We're all doing it, the Chinese, US, Aussies... ignoring an individual's privacy under the guise of security concerns and welfare for all. Do most even care that what we do is no longer private?
Maybe not.. especially the "younger" generation growing up in an era of selfie narcissism.
Did you know that since 2001, Telstra agreed to store huge volumes of electronic communications it carried between Asia and the US for potential surveillance by the FBI and the US Department of Justice.
All communications including the IP address, content of emails, online messages and phone calls involving a US point of contact is sent through to a secure storage facility on US soil that is staffed exclusively by US citizens carrying a top-level security clearance. [Read more here]
In China, poor Peng Hong was at home tapping away at his computer when a message popped up unexpectedly on his screen telling him to report urgently to the local police station.
Peng dismissed it as a computer virus until police appeared unannounced at his door weeks later. [Read more here]
Blogger and journalist Michele Catalano was Googling pressure cookers. She wanted a pressure cooker to cook quinoa, her husband had been using the same computer to search for backpacks and the couple's 20-year-old son after reading about the Boston bombings, was clicking links about home-made bombs.
What happened next was, authorities swooped. They visited the couple's home at about 9am. It was real black ops stuff, six guys in three black SUVs pulled up and surrounded the house. [Read more here]
There is a belief that Skype offers end-to-end encryption, meaning communications are encrypted by one user, transmitted over the wire, and then decrypted only when they reach the other party and are fully under that party's control. This is clearly not the case as Microsoft has the ability to read and regularly scans message contents for signs of fraud, and company managers may log the results indefinitely. [Read more here]
There is agreement the NSA’s PRISM technology is based on optical fibre “wiretaps” placed at the connection of internet providers to companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook in the US gaining access from nine Internet companies to a wide range of digital information, including e-mails and stored data. No one is really sure how it all works but it works. [Read more here] and [Here]
