In a series of reveals since last Wednesday, it’s been coming to light that the US and also the UK governments have been using a somewhat anomalously defined internet and communications surveillance platform called “PRISM”. Whilst specific details are harder to come by, the general gist of it is that the program has been pulling call logs from Verizon and also has, apparently, been able to access user data from big data companies like Google, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Dropbox and the likes.
Obviously as soon as this story broke, and as it appeared to get worse, the internet has been in uproar. Across the western world conspiracy theorists have been sending “I told you so”s to every comments section of every article about this they can get their hands on, the use of the word “sheeple” has increased on forums and the rustle of tinfoil has been drifting on the breeze as many decide that they might not be so safe as they first thought.
More readable responses have been flooding into news and tech websites, with the overall message being that we should be afraid of this, that this is a Very Big Deal and we should be Very Upset.
And, continuing in the same vein as the opinion piece that was written and short time ago on the issue of privacy for this blog, all I can say is this whole thing is exhaustingly neurotic. The government has been collecting data on you, big deal, so have Google, Facebook, Apple and every other tech company who’s services you use. You’ve been leaking data about yourself into the internet for the last 15 years or so, has anything bad happened? If so, did it involve the Government, or some corporation using your data against you? Or was it perhaps a criminal element using your shockingly poor attempts at protecting your data against you?
All of these conspiracy style privacy freakouts rely on the Governments perfoming this data gathering to be efficient, modern and capable of handling the vast amounts of data that they are apparently pulling in. The reality is that it’s probably run by a bunch of non-tech savvy civil-servants who are still stuck in the mid 2000s way of seeing the internet, if that. Speaking of the mid 2000s, the reports say that this PRISM program has been going on since 2007. That’s 5 years worth of this going on without us knowing, and, like I asked before, has it affected you in any way?
This might be a breach of trust to some, but really, this isn’t a Big Deal. The government isn’t going to suddenly turn your data on you, that is, unless you’re doing something you shouldn’t be. Then why the hell would you be storing it online? This also isn’t the miscarraige of the civil contract that it’s being made out to be.
You know what is?
This.
That’s a link to an article highlighting that one of the hacktivists that helped expose the Stuebenville rapists could, if convicted, get 10 years in jail. That’s five times the jail time that the actual rapists are getting. This should be getting some serious air time as a serious issue of unbalance in the justice system and the laws surrounding serious crimes like Rape compared to technology based crimes like Hacktivism. If you want something to get your blood pressure up over, let it be over a young man who helped bring rapists to deserved punishment being unfairly punished himself; and not over the fact that the government might know that you call your mum every day even though you’re in your 40’s.
