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USA Today Names Edward Snowden Tech Person of the Year

Posted by Unknown on from the things-to-do-before-you're-thirty dept.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the USA Today tech column: "...But until a lone information-technology contractor named Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents to the media this summer, we didn't know just how much we'd surrendered. Now that we do, our nation can have a healthy debate — out in the open, as a democracy should debate — about how good a bargain we got in that exchange. For facilitating that debate, at great risk to his own personal liberty, Snowden is this column's technology person of the year for 2013."

1 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Re:USA Today reported on NSA's spying in *2006* by EdIII · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't think you or the OP of this particular thread gets it at *all*.

    It's not that we now know about the NSA and what they were doing. We most certainly did.

    It's that we have FUCKING PROOF.

    In 2006, I was saying much the same things. I had high hopes for Obama because I honestly thought he was going to give us justice over some of that telco bullshit. Of course not. I was naive.

    What Snowden has done, and deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for, is give me CREDIBILITY.

    Now when I have a calm, not so agitated, san tin-foil conversation with somebody now about security, I get taken seriously.

    I'm being asked right now what it would take to raise the level of security for several companies. What chat software could we use that is heavily encrypted? What should we be doing to vet hardware?

    Most of it is of course executives wanting their conversations to be discrete so it can't be used against them, but that is progress nonetheless...

    At the very least now when I talk about mass surveillance I don't see rolled eyes and skepticism. I have their attention.

    Thanks Snowden.