Slashdot Mirror
How To Block the NSA From Your Friends List
Atticus Rex writes "The fact that our social networking services are so centralized is a big part of why they fall so easily to government surveillance. It only takes a handful of amoral Zuckerbergs to hand over hundreds of millions of people's data to PRISM. That's why this Slate article makes the case for a mass migration to decentralized, free software social networks, which are much more robust to spying and interference. On top of that, these systems respect your freedom as a software user (or developer), and they're less likely to pepper you with obnoxious advertisements."
On a related note, identi.ca is ditching their Twitter clone platform for pump.io which promises an experience closer to the Facebook news feed. Unfortunately, adoption seems slow since Facebook, Google, et al have an interest in preventing interoperability and it can be lonely on the distributed social network.
I read the article from theatlanticwire, and it did not even suggest that Google was forwarding anything. It stated that the NSA wants a "Google" for emails, not that Google is forwarding emails. It stated that NSA analysts were listening to phone sex from US troops overseas, not the Google was forwarding phone sex calls.
I did not read the first article about the Google employee who monitored chats of teenagers. However as I recall, he was fired and convicted.
Google might be involved in something sinister, but you have not highlighted anything.
The internet started far more distributed than it is now, and people flocked en-mass to centralized networks to which they could give complete control over their data and communications. People do not think beyond their immediate personal convenience, so any such idea for the long term good is doomed from the start if it requires the slightest bit of forethought.
Still even people who take privacy seriously obsess over government spying and not the corporate spying. People are voluntarily signing over their privacy rights to corporations more powerful than the governments for peanuts. "One bag of peanuts free if you let us eternal access to all your private data" The line will wind around the block in no time.
Problem 1: Most people don't take privacy seriously.
Problem 2: People who do, focus on the less powerful government and ignore the more powerful corporations
Problem 3: There is no profit in helping people keep their data private to balance the profit to be made by exploiting the private data.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yeh, I'm not so anti-Google as you, but that data was only available for the NSA because Google chose to collect it. THEY made the decision to collect live search, THEY made the decision to track search history per IP. By collecting that data, THEY made a honey pot waiting for an NSA warrant.
I'll give it to them that mail storage is a function of mail, but all the linkage of data together with Android device, search, email, name (ever paid by credit card), telephone number (2 part authentication & Android), all of that is a function of them spanning so many markets and forcing linkage of the data via the privacy change a few years ago. THEIR choice.
So I've switched to Duck Duck go, because the EFF said it was ok (and I'll change again when a better non-US alternative comes along), and I've switch from Gmail to ISP mail with encrypted connection and POP3. Since now a lot more emails will no longer transit US networks, and encrypted TLS connection will make content more difficult to grab.
Social networks were always a problem and always will be. Google are not the worst there, Facebook is (and I think Zuckerberg is a f**ing liar on this NSA matter, I wouldn't be surprised if NSA was among his early venture funders). But Google take their share of blame.
Skype is gone, I read the PRISM intercept, and everything can be watched live.
That is what I'm missing, a good encrypted open source replacement for Skype with end to end encryption.
Just increase the noise.
Friend EVERYONE.
Call random numbers from your cell.
Setup your own spamming mail server.
Put key words in white text in your posts.
Start fake twitter/facebook/youtube channels.
A few million of us generating 2 fake identities each could soon drown out the real data.
Now, does anyone have Abu Hamzas twitter details?
Whats the dialing code for North Korea?