Q: Are you paranoid fascists?
A: Aye
and so on, for
US, UK, NZ, Aus
To me, what is the scariest part of the Snowden
disclosures so far is that the five major anglo
countries are all spying on each other so that
they can give this stolen information back to
its country of origin, in exchange for the dirt
on its own citizens.
That passes for following the letter of the
law while still being rights-abrogating
fascists.
Here's a man who should know about this
system as he continues to be a victim of
it , to this day. An intro. The military-
style raid on the house of this man, who
has no history of violence, and yes the
governments do know if he's violent
because they spy on everybody. In this
case, it all went down because of the request
from the US entertainment industry to shut
down a "filesharing" site:
checkit: guardian.co.uk
Prism: concerns over government tyranny are legitimate
The post 9/11 security narrative has eroded our privacy rights in favour of government control. Prism should be discontinued immediately
Kim Dotcom
Thursday 13 June 2013 09.01 BST
Nobody would be shocked to hear me admit that I have a problem with authority. During most of my adult life, I have resisted the notion that the government always acts in the best interests of its citizens. Edward Snowden’s recent interview with the Guardian underscores the possibility that those like me – who see the state as a potential threat to basic civil rights and liberties – may have been right all along.
Snowden’s leak of classified US government information acquired during his work for the National Security Agency (NSA) confirms that the US government is gathering and archiving online data and metadata on a massive scale. The data is stored at NSA data centers, where zettabytes of cloud storage are available to authorities. Snowden’s revelations have again framed the debate over the balance between our privacy rights and our need for security.
Some proponents of Prism assert that it is an essential tool against terrorism. They claim that only data belonging to foreigners (that is, non-US residents) is retained, and that content is not reviewed as a matter of course, only algorithmically analysed for suspicious patterns. They point out that a search warrant is still required from a secret court set up under the US. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) may be spun up so that content – accumulated over years of daily internet spooling – may be extracted and analysed, laying bare a suspect’s entire virtual life.
Those safeguards have limited value. According to congressional reporting, the FISA court received 1,789 applications for authority to conduct electronic surveillance in 2012, but not one application was denied. We cannot debate whether the FISA court is a rubber stamp, because its proceedings are secret. Further, any assurance to US citizens that the NSA will not gather and archive their data is suspect. The “Five Eyes” alliance between the intelligence agencies of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK effectively permits those governments to circumvent the prohibition against gathering data on their own citizens by sharing information across the Five Eyes intelligence community. The UK for example can spy on Americans and make that information available to the US government on its massive spy cloud – one that the NSA operates and the Five Eyes share.
Prior to 9/11, the operative presumption in developed nations favoured privacy, but the security narrative has since reversed the presumption, eroding our privacy rights in favour of government control over our personal information. However, government is an instrument – sometimes a crude one – susceptible to abuse, as demonstrated by recent admissions that the US Internal Revenue Service has targeted specific groups based on ideology. When we empower the state, we empower those that hold sway over the state, and the state is subject to influence from a multitude of quarters.
I have personally been a victim of such abuses. The US government has indicted me, shut down my cloud storage company Megaupload and seized all of my assets because it claims I was complicit in copyright infringement by some of the people who used the Megaupload service. I have emphasised that I am being prosecuted not because the charges against me have some sound basis in US copyright law, but because the US justice department has been instrumentalised by certain private interests that have a financial stake in neutralising my business. That trend represents a danger not just to me, but to all of us.
Recent polls in the US suggest that the public is not much preoccupied with the fact that our data is being retained, so long as our own political party is in control of the government. That kind of fickle comfort is small-minded. The point we should derive from Snowden’s revelations – a point originally expressed in March 2013 by William Binney, a former senior NSA crypto-mathematician – is that the NSA’s Utah Data Center will amount to a “turnkey” system that, in the wrong hands, could transform the country into a totalitarian state virtually overnight. Every person who values personal freedom, human rights and the rule of law must recoil against such a possibility, regardless of their political preference. Others take a more cavalier approach, such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2009: “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”
