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Privacy Behaviors Changed Little After Snowden
An anonymous reader writes: An article in Communications of the ACM takes a look at how Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillance have changed privacy behaviors across the world. The results are fairly disappointing. While the news that intelligence agencies were trawling data from everyday citizens sparked an interest in privacy, it was small, and faded quickly. Even through media coverage has continued for a long time after the initial reports, public interest dropped back to earlier levels long ago. The initial interest spike was notably less than for other major news events. Privacy-enhancing behaviors experienced a small surge, but that too failed to impart any long-term momentum. The author notes that the spike in interest "following the removal of privacy-enhancing functions in Facebook, Android, and Gmail" was stronger than the reaction to the government's privacy-eroding actions.
Any questions?
I didn't change my behaviour because I was already doing what I could to protect myself from spammers, scammers, sniffers, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other such annoying and often illegal behaviour. Wherever encryption was available, I used it.
Being somewhat paranoid due to my periodic bi-polar "manic" periods, I already was convinced the goobernmints and corporations of the world were up to nefarious snooping and hacking. Snowden didn't "inform" me of anything; all he did was confirm what I already believed.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The state, which was formerly the institution from the people for the people, is now an institution to protect property and economic interests. Therefore, it must spy on us so unrest can be contained. However, this only works as long as the unrest (towards the owners) does not include 10-15% of the population. Therefore, you need media and companies which provide us with products and dreams. And to be able to perfectly match our dreams and needs you need information on us. Therefore, the companies spy on us too. Isn't that wonderful.
Why should it have made a difference? I had always assumed that this kind of surveillance went on. I was suprised that people were suprised by Snowden's revelations.
The state, which was formerly the institution from the people for the people
When was that?
First, as the Washington Post states, "Voter turnout in primary elections this year has been abysmal." People complain about government policy, yet don't exercise their power to change it. They would rather "like" something on Facebook, like that has some power to change policy. If you were able to get all those likes to turn to votes, you could have an impact on policy. Second, if you don't want companies tracking your Internet usage, stop clicking on advertisements. Get all your Facebook friends to stop clicking. Soon they will be unprofitable and will go away. Just complaining about it doesn't change anything. Protesting in the street doesn't change anything, unless you get people to change their habits. If you can't find anyone who supports your viewpoint to vote for, run yourself.
Of course the problem with this characterization is it somehow implies that this is something only people with mental illness believe.
The reality is, it is now an objective fact that it is true.
But for some reason this fact hasn't sunk in, and people keep acting like it's solely for paranoids and other crazy people to be concerned about.
And that's simply not true.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Look at what people willingly broadcast to the public over Twitter/Facebook.
Given that, why would you think they would care at all about privacy?
If you believe in privacy, you can't make the vast majority of people care about it. All we can do as computer professionals is try to provide as much privacy as possible, for those that do not know nor care...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From its creation until the first bribe. So, at least a few hours.
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The problem is that they don't notice their privacy being compromised during the daily use of the service. Maybe they will see some tailored advertisements but that's it. If they would get a detailed report about what information is pulled from their messages and how it is used, then maybe they would change their minds about using the service. All the datamining happens quietly in the background. It's a discreet man-in-the-middle operation.
The state, which was formerly the institution from the people for the people,
This is sarcasm, right? Please tell me no one is really this naive. The US was formed by a bunch of rich white people for their own interests. Hence why most states, even after ratification, maintained for many decades their requirements that one be a landowner to vote which basically denied the vote to poor white people, most freed blacks, and many others. And then even after some states relaxed that requirement for whites, they still imposed it on freed blacks.
is now an institution to protect property and economic interests.
It was always such an institution. What sort of white-washed history were you taught that you would actually believe such silliness?
"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change"
- Edward Snowden, at the end of Terms and Conditions May Apply
It's too damn complicated for level 1 techs, let alone end users and the general public, to attempt to opt of surveillance, or even intelligently express their dissatisfaction with government and corporate policies.
Politicians don't care and corporations do. These policies will persist until people's lives are strongly negatively affected. Will it require significant damage as a result of foreign powers hacking into the industrial grid? Probably. God knows we aren't in the streets protesting TSA security theater, and its difficult to get more privacy invasive than seeing folks naked.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
And even then, Slashdot sometimes messes up the formatting so the above comment won't verify.
Then again, gpg isn't really intended for message board/Slashdot use.
Just suppose that following Snowden a large percentage of the population decided to significantly increase the security of the internet use. This would force the NSA et al to increase power of their automated collection systems to compensate and those of us already taking enhanced security measures would lose out. If the populous does nothing then the NSA can just continue as they were. ..... Nothing! (or at least nothing interesting to the NSA). He has wasted considerable time, his apple has gone brown and he has nothing to show for it. I am just as iritated as before, but now he is iritated as well.
Of course, one could argue that this lack of popular action simply makes security concious users stand out in the eyes of the NSA and attracts special attention. But perhaps this is also a good thing. Allow me to explain:
I start with the precept that the NSA will be able to gain access to practically everything I do online (and probably offline) no matter what I do. Given this, I would far rather be a special case. Imagine somone at NSA HQ clicking the "Collect and analyse all internet traffic from the UK" icon. Their computers hoover up some vast number of terabytes including mine and finds little of interest. The operative takes another bite from his apple and clicks the next icon "Collect and analyse all.....". My data has been spied on and I am iritated, but unless he finds a rotten bit of apple he isn't.
Now imagine that my security is rather better than most. The operative clicks the icon, but gets an error saying "Data from Huskydog not available". Gosh, thinks the operative, someone hiding their information, I must have stumbled upon an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell. He puts down his apple and starts to dig deeper. Eventually, after some time and effort he breaks in and
So, given that we wish to iritate the NSA (and that is probably we worst we can hope to do to them) perhaps the best solution is to have a significant number of special cases which stand out from the easy to access heard and thus require special time consuming efforts to spy on but with nothing to show for it in the end.
No. There's too much irrelevant celebrity bullshit and unimportant fluff to do that, but that kind of "news" is designed to distract, not inform. Only cover the important issues and there's plenty of time.
Any comedian (and yes, I realize what that implies about what a fucking sad a state of affairs we're really in). In particular, John Stewart, Steven Colbert and John Oliver are infinitely more informative than any allegedly-"actual" "news." And I mean "infinitely" literally, by the way -- measuring the valuable insight of, say, Fox News is like dividing by zero.
For example, John Oliver devoted an entire half-hour to government surveillance, including an interview with Edward Snowden where he (humorously) distilled these privacy issues into terms the general public would understand. I'm fucking appalled to have to say this, but that is many orders of magnitude better journalism than I've seen from any of those pathetically worthless toadies who actually call themselves "journalists" in decades.
And that's not even all! If you look at Youtube's autoplay list for John Oliver's videos, it appears that just about every goddamn episode covers an actually-important issue (civil forfeiture, the wealth gap, crumbling infrastructure, police brutality, net neutrality, etc.) and does it better than anyone in the mainstream media has managed since Walter fucking Cronkite!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
John Oliver and his team are the best investigative journalists in the USA.
--
It's a poor workman who blames his tools; a rich workman can afford better tools.
If you find this funny, stop for a moment and consider WHY it is you find this funny.
Because it isn't in the slightest. Having this as the accepted reality of state formation in human society speaks volumes of us as species.