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How the NSA Is Spying On Everyone: More Revelations
The Intercept has published today a story detailing documents that "reveal how the NSA plans to secretly introduce new flaws into communication systems so that they can be tapped into—a controversial tactic that security experts say could be exposing the general population to criminal hackers." The documents also describe a years-long effort, aimed at hostile and friendly regimes, from the point of view of the U.S. government, to break the security of various countries' communications networks.
"Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks."
Don't muddy the waters by implying that only a specific, "bad-apple" division of government is doing the stalking. It is government that is doing the stalking. The specific division of government (NSA) is utterly irrelevant to the victims. That only matters to the aggressor.
If it was a private company doing the stalking, you wouldn't say that "Human Resources" is the aggressor and ignore the fact that Human Resources is owned by, funded by, and works for Google. You would state the obvious and say that Google is the aggressor.
In other words, this is a failure of government, not "the NSA". Government is attacking your basic human right to free association, not "the NSA".
Yea, but at this point I think we should just give up on this. It's just not possible to protect yourself from a group with the size, clout and finances of the NSA. I think you and I both know, the easiest way for them to solve most of their problems is just have high level people in just about all of these companies on their payroll. If I were a DBA at a company like Google I'd be sitting in the lunchroom wondering which of my colleagues were the NSA guys and which were not.
The only fix for all of this is to shut down the agency completely. Such a thing cannot exist in a free world. Yes, we'll be less safe from it. But I'll take a 1 in 250,000,000 chance of dieing in a terrorist attack over a 1 in 1 chance of having my mail read any day.
Technically the people of the United States have the authority. It's such a shame that the government has been able to sucker the less intelligent masses into giving up liberty under the "threat" of terrorism.
My solution was simply to move out of the USA. I've been an ex-pat going on a decade now and couldn't be happier. I plan to renounce my US citizenship this coming year.