From the article:
Edward Snowden’s not the story. The fate of the internet is.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet
The internet was never private or secure. All the NSA did was fine tune and consolidate the info gathering Google and all the others are doing. My guess is they’re not alone in this category. Snowden just made what they do public. Someone else will likely spill the beans on some other government shortly.
Huh? The internet was never ‘one’ thing. It is a massive collection of networks & more networks. Many millions of which are private and secure (encryption) while many millions were public and non-secure. Then you can go totally non-public and secure on deepweb and deep net. The internet is both and everything in-between.
The NSA has done much more than data collection, and storage by their own admission. A major portion is code breaking (cryptanalysis) and data mining the stored data, which is everything. By everything, they mean everything too, every communication from tweets to emails to phone calls, every bit of shopping, travel, etc. Again, this is by their own admission too. Very recently they said they were close to breaking some 20 year old encryption programs which would literally open the floodgates to terabytes of secure data they have never had access to. Of course the new encryption will be much harder to break which is why they’ve been building the worlds fastest computers.
Anyway, I thought the main point of the article was as the title stated, the death of a global internet. Sure many countries never had one, or did and it was then shut down, but many countries had true global access which is coming to an end. What they called ‘Balkanised’. Just an interesting article imho.
Of course it’s already over. As a former senior NSA employee said in an article recently…he held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
Nothing about the Snowden situation has lead me to say “Oh my god, the global web is gonna die.” This is a huge overreaction in my opinion, and a reaction that changes depending on what political party the president at the time belongs to. We have known that this has been happening for years. Seriously, it has been in the public eye as early as the pass of the Patriot Act, except back then, people were welcoming it with open arms.
Actually it predated that, probably by many years. The last big uproar that blew over relatively quickly was ECHELON. It was rumored to be for collecting phone data but my guess is it had a larger net.
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Me either. Like article said, it isn’t even about Snowden. I don’t think the article is doing anything but stating known facts about the global internet and it’s current path. In my opinion it is totally independent of any political party as they’re both owned and controlled by the same people.
So it seems you think that since this restricting of the global web was happening earlier (Patriot Act) and still happening that means it isn’t worth reading or thinking about? Seems like a contradiction to me? I might be reading it wrong?
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