[smc-discuss] Facebook and Google spy on you

[Pirate Praveen]

On Tuesday 11 November 2014 05:45 PM, Pirate Praveen wrote:
> 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

Another powerful story for people who believe they have nothing to hide
or the information they share are innocent.

She was an art student and she tells the story of how the Stasi tried to
recruit her as an informant.
 “People say of the NSA, ‘I have nothing to hide.’ But it doesn’t
matter. There is no such thing as innocent
 information. I had things I needed to hide from the East German
authorities but that wasn’t what they blackmailed
 me with. They blackmailed me with my father’s job. He was a doctor,
employed by the state. They said: ‘Don’t you
 care about what happens to your family if he loses his job?’

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