Blog archive from the golden age of London libertarianism
The NSA whistle-blower speaks movingly about his motivation. Click to view the video on the Guardian site.
More: Jack of Kent advises caution, Guido is skeptical and finding holes, and there is enough unexplained technical detail to think it could even be massive error.
And don’t forget who he votes for (via Lew Rockwell): Ron Paul 2012
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There’s a good deal of evidence from other sources about this. It’s just relatively little known outside privacy circles. Guardian’s anti-Americanism and Greenwald’s arrogance make them focus badly and miss the bigger picture, and this story stands up worse than it might accordingly. See my piece in City AM:
http://www.cityam.com/article/america-s-murky-data-gathering-has-shades-britain-s-snooper-s-charter
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Having heard this news quite a lot over the past few weeks and feeling personally compelled today to do my own reading, I read at length about Edward Snowden. I feel I’m quite lucky to have been exposed to the libertarian arguments and being in a position where I understand the importance of personal liberty. Given that it was easy for me to interpret the values / principles that Snowden communicated in his interview with the Guardian.
I however, took a moment, and shared my thoughts with a colleague, and was surprised by her reaction. We did not get into the details as to what level of detail the NSA was accessing, or even as to how they got hold of that data. The discussion was about the underlying principle of some body or organization having access to your personal data on the internet and why is that so wrong. Her high level arguments were:
– Nothing on the internet is private – From work to googling or facebooking, either the IT security team at work or google or facebook management can view your activity on the internet whenever they want to.
– So what if the government is able to access this data, it’s for the sake of protecting us from terrorism. What can be so wrong about that?
I’m not too concerned about answering these specific questions, but what amazes me is that there appears to be very little respect or concern for the need to protect privacy or basic liberties. In fact it’s not an item of high priority to address at all. I wonder of how many people think like that and if the idea of personal freedom will ever be a priority for people, or if we have become too used some organization or body controlling each and every aspect of our life….
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