The Guardian somberly intones that the story isn't Edward Snowden (pay no attention to that little man behind the new Iron Curtain!) but the "real story" is "the Internet" (that thing Evgeny Morozov claims doesn't really exist, and some days, one could believe him when they see the Internet described like this, as a fragile thing shrinking from rumour and innuendo).
John Naughton's hysteria:
In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.
But the NSA hasn't accessed the meaningful content of citizens' digital content across the world; it has at best scanned only metadata and at worst machine-scanned content of some flagged accounts for cause in order to make matches. This "secret court" that has Naughton and others so outraged is already known (and wasn't revealed by Snowden) and is a court that has oversight by Congress -- and has to perform the function of countering terrorism. What's your plan for combating terrorism if you publicize everything you know about their plots with open data on suspects? Did you have one?
My comment:
In other words, what the Russian delegation and other bad actors at the World Conference on International Telecommunications wanted with control of the Internet and "sovereign Internets" has been achieved. Mission accomplished, with the help of WikiLeaks, who guided Snowden to Moscow where he was either always scripted into an "active measure" against the West or was exploited as one. No accident, comrades!
Snowden hasn't committed any public service or whistleblowing (he was deliberately misleading about the "direct access" issue to sow panic); with this Kremlin-inspired agitprop, he has helped unleash mass hysteria and anti-American hate campaigns to the advantage of Russia and China, um, those friends of Internet freedom.
But it's mainly the Guardian stoking this moral panic about privacy that no one has yet to prove is really violated by blind machines scanning metadata for matches to terrorist groups -- you know, even less intrusive than the way G-mail scans the content of your email to serve you ads. No one has produced a single case of actual civil rights violations except a vague invocation by Snowden of "a hacker suspect's girlfriend" having her cell phone bugged. Tell us who that is, and maybe we can assess the bona fides of this entire caper better, you know?
I expect that companies will respond with a bit tightening of opt-in or opt-out privacy issues usually described as access to data for marketing purposes, and life will go on. Capitalism usually does trump communism.
The longer Snowden stays in Russia and the less we hear from him, the harder it will be for the Guardian to make this entire narrative stick.
I personally have always thought "the cloud" was an iffy proposition due to hackers, intramural rivaly among the Big IT corporations fighting over it, and bad actors like Russian and Chinese government sponsored hackers.
The cloud, put simply, is other people's computers, not your own. When you put your data on other people's computers to save money or time or have virtualized machines or whatever, you lose the ability to protect it on your own private property. It's a very simple proposition that has literally been clouded over by the fantasy elements afforded by imagining that the Internet is heaven.
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