[smc-discuss] Facebook and Google spy on you

[Pirate Praveen]

I think we missed the angle of mass surveillance in this whole debate.
Sharing a story I read today.

Do you want all people to talk only about silly ordinary things? How
about when someone makes powerful people uncomfortable? Do you want them
to be not hiding?

Is this only about you? Whose responsibility is it to protect whistle
blowers and dissenters?

Do you want every political opponent to be tracked by ruling political
party? Do you want all people to stop saying uncomfortable things?

_____________
 “But then I think who is going to be interested in my silly little love
notes to my boyfriend? For ordinary small people with simple ordinary
lives, I think it is not so much of an issue.”

But what if they are? What if somebody is interested? What if Ulrike
decides, in 20 years’ time, to stand for parliament? What if Germany’s
government changes? What if someone does read her silly little love
notes? What if they don’t seem so silly – or so innocent – at some
unknown point in the future?

It could happen because it has happened. Anne Roth, a political
scientist who’s now a researcher on the German NSA inquiry, tells me
perhaps the most chilling story. How she and her husband and their two
children – then aged two and four – were caught in a “data mesh”. How an
algorithm identified her husband, an academic sociologist who
specialises in issues such as gentrification, as a terrorist suspect on
the basis of seven words he’d used in various academic papers.

Seven words? “Identification was one. Framework was another.
Marxist-Leninist was another, but you know he’s a sociologist… ” It was
enough for them to be placed under surveillance for a year. And then, at
dawn, one day in 2007, armed police burst into their Berlin home and
arrested him on suspicion of carrying out terrorist attacks.

But what was the evidence, I say? And Roth tells me. “It was his
metadata. It was who he called. It was the fact that he was a political
activist. That he used encryption techniques – this was seen as highly
suspicious. That sometimes he would go out and not take his cellphone
with him… ”

He was freed three weeks later after an international outcry, but the
episode has left its marks. “Even in the bathroom, I’d be wondering: is
there a camera in here?”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins-digital-exiles-tech-activists-escape-nsa


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