Actually, it is. If we use services that do not keep logs or has real name policies, or if we favor companies that takes an active stance against surveillance rather than just buying from what ever is cheapest, we pushes society into a place where the spying is not socially accepted practices for for-profit organizations.

This event is already having that effect in EU. Governments is already creating policy/laws that favors national services over Google. If they go a step further and make a law that forbids moving privileged information to a US data cloud to be picked and prodded by spies and advertisers, that will have a real effect on Google, Microsoft, amazon and Apple. Suddenly, doctors can not use iphones connected with icloud for their practice. Lawyers can't use Microsoft 360 with mails going through Microsoft servers or store their mail in the cloud. Government can't purchase amazon cloud for developing. Even schools can't use Google docs when working with student records.

I have no doubt in me that the us government would listen to Google, Microsoft, amazon and Apple if such law was ever created.

There is such a law:

http://export.gov/safeharbor/eu/eg_main_018365.asp

US companies that want to hold EU data in the US have to guarantee the same level of protection the EU provides.

Do that law prevent surveliance initiated by the state, and does it put liability at those who use the services rather than putting liability at those who offers the service?

Ie, can someone use that law to sue a doctor who happens to use gmail/microsoft/icloud for communicate with his patients?

If the EU had their own Facebook and Google, it'll have their own intelligence agencies tapping data from those servers.

Sure we can perhaps get them to change their minds by boycotting, but try asking a regular American citizen to fully disconnect from the internet.

> If the EU had their own Facebook and Google, it'll have their own intelligence agencies tapping data from those servers.

This is a fallacy that gets repeated a lot.

First of all, the EU is not a single entity, but rather a hydra with many heads. The competency and resources of "intelligence agencies" varies a lot by country, the privacy laws and the wire-taping/surveillance culture too.

If you are speaking about the UK, sure, but try doing this in Germany. Also, in my country (Romania) the government wouldn't have the resources for it and they are too incompetent to cooperate with other agencies without people finding out about it. I also cannot see France doing this, since the French get pretty violent when they get upset. So what EU are you talking about exactly?

Second, even if snooping of online activity does happen in an EU country, at least it's an EU intelligence agency you're talking about. This is relevant for US companies, because I don't know how much EU's governments care about our privacy, but I can assure you that they care about leaks to the US or China or other non-EU countries. Which means US companies will suffer for it.

The USA was and is still seen as the benevolent dictator of the Internet. That's why we've been accepting your governance of TLDs, or your online services. That's why we've been blaming China for their tight control of online access. But if the US government keeps jerking around much, things will change.

> First of all, the EU is not a single entity, but rather a hydra with many heads. The competency and resources of "intelligence agencies" varies a lot by country, the privacy laws and the wire-taping/surveillance culture too.

Not that much.

The is a single EU privacy directive, (95/46/EC), and an extension to provide better privacy for online data (2002/58/EC). All the member state have implemented the same directive. What changes among states are just implementation details (as a programmer would say).

The thing to note here is that the EU directive provides a blanket exception for almost all governmental organizations and for all the police branches. This means that something like PRISM, if architectured in a proper way, would be completely legal.

Truth be told, in EU most telcos and ISP are forced by the law to keep track of all the communications and forward them to the relevant authorities either in batch or on demand.

EU directives are in general just guidelines. The EU is a culturally and politically diverse part of the world and there are differences between countries like night and day.

The EU directives are legally binding acts that force every member state to implement them in 2 years and in the proper way. Big fines have have been levied in the past against member states that tried shortcuts. The EU directives are also more powerful than local laws: if a state law conflicts with a directive, the directive takes precedence.

The state of the political part of the EU is not the mess many politicians say.

However, my main point is that in EU a program like PRISM would be totally legal under current laws. And it is probably already in place if you think about the SIREN program and you make it access the wealth of data harvested through the data retention directives.

I'm not sure how the countries exactly cooperate with each other, but let's say a social network is located in the Netherlands and has tons of European users. What's stopping the Dutch intelligence agencies from spying on European users, including the Romanians who use said social network?

Spying on EU citizens outside of Netherlands is more complicated, first because we aren't Dutch and compared to the US, we are EU citizens so it's not like they don't care about foreigners, the issue being delicate.

I'm not saying that they can't do that. I'm saying that they are thinking twice about it.

The EU does not have it's own singular intelligence agency. It's not a country. EU states may have their own but there's a big difference between the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden in terms of approach.

The US and other parts of the world aren't one single country either, but that doesn't stop the US intelligence agencies from collecting data from all over the world.

One of the biggest problems with the political situation here in Italy is the level of cynicism and "oh poor us, we can't do anything". That attitude is a very sure way of not being able to do anything, and it's absolutely poisonous.

That's not my attitude at all, in fact I'm arguing that our options are limited to sitting back and accepting this new way of life or grabbing pitchforks and taking to the streets.

The separation of powers -- separated into judicial, legislative, and executive branches -- no longer applies. We're seeing unprecedented cooperation between all three branches and, put simply, American democracy is dead.

Our congressional representatives are in on it and they're fine with it, the judiciary approved it all, and the executive branch uses it for their own selfish benefit.

When we heard Obama say "no more illegal wiretapping" then we thought he was going to discontinue it all, but he actually looked the other way while congress made it perfectly legal and accepted instead. Very insidious.

> American democracy is dead.

Hyperbolic bullshit like this is reason #122783278 why I hate to see politics on this site.

Perhaps the statement is a bit dramatic. However, there's plenty of evidence of things not being right. From passing laws with huge holes primed for abuse (Obamacare) without even reading them and telling us "we have to pass it to see what's in it" [1] to blantantly changing votes to suit their agenda [2] and trying to justify spying on us because one day we might become terrorists [3]. Our representative republic has definitely mutated into something very different from what it was supposed to be. Just these three examples make the term "representative" --as applied to those who are supposed to represent us-- laughable.

[1] http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU

[2] http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l2sWTwbzAcw "Let them do what they are going to do"

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/court-order-veri... "in case they became terrorist suspects in future"

> there's plenty of evidence of things not being right

No shit!

Things were never "right", starting from the constitution defining slaves as 3/5ths of a human being. Women couldn't vote 100 years ago. In a lot of southern states, things were still pretty bad 50 years ago, and the idea of a black person being president was science fiction.

You can dig up similar dirt on pretty much any country with enough history. Did you know that in Switzerland, universal suffrage for women wasn't fully approved until the 1970ies? Italy? Berlusconi - need I say more?

Not right, however, does not mean "dead", and those who conflate the two come across as ill-informed, at best.

Having to argue that the US is not just like North Korea as part of any political debate leaves little room for any serious, nuanced considerations.

From a fact based analysis, it's not bullshit. Read your history, look at current situation as data to be sifted through and it's obvious that the reality is different from the popular image portrayed.

Democracies are big, messy, and very much imperfect things. They have good sides, and bad sides, and don't always behave how we think they ought to. Like the quote says, democracy is a terrible way to run a country; it's just better than all the others.

Labeling the whole thing as "dead" is pure hyperbole, and probably a lame excuse not to get involved and do the hard work that is necessary to change broken stuff.

If it were dead and nonexistent, then people would not have been able to liberalize marijuana use in Colorado and Washington, nor approved measures allowing gay people to marry the people they love in several states.

Just because we get a few token gestures, doesn't mean we have any real change. What happens in Washington and Colorado really doesn't affect the people in power and may be advantageous for them to use in the future as scapegoat material.

Democracy seems reasonably alive at a state level. Most of the complaints & problems seem to be with the federal government.

Those are minor issues blown out of proportion to engage the population, divide it along imaginary lines and have them go through victories and defeats and enjoy the show. It's the circus part of "bread and circuses". Real issues are decided upon without ever consulting you. Just IMHO

> minor issues

Wow, tell that to someone who can finally have all the legal rights that most married couples enjoy. Or all the folks on the other side who are convinced that their own marriages are forever ruined and the country on the road to hell because some people can get married.

Still, I think that specific issue is on the radar all the time and addressed by presidents and politicians precisely because of its divisive nature (can be easily used to divide people into warring factions, for historical/religious/whatever reasons). In the grand scheme of things, there are much more urgent problems to be solved. This is not meant to be dismissive of a particular group who have suffered a particular injustice in a particular point in time (there are many such groups and many injustices that are never discussed on a national level and turned into political shows).

EDIT: To clarify, I fully understand that it's a problem that needs to be addressed. I'm against any injustice against any group of people, based on arbitrary historical prejudices or otherwise. I'm just expressing my opinion on how the people who decide which issues to address and how to address them are motivated by political convenience vs actual priority.

You have to accept that the rules of the fight are broken to acknowledge that the fight must be won by breaking the rules, and to act on that you have to surrender your comforts provided by those rules. People will never do that in any state of relative comfort.

As a vindictive mofo, my approach now is to help them step on the nail so I can say 'told you so'. This approach was very fun in respect to the Patriot Act, HLS, etc and the now resulting NSA crap. Join me on the dark side.

#edit well the second bit was addressing the previous rampant down-voting you had received.

I disagree, they work for us. The sooner you realize that is the sooner we get this fixed.

They don't work for us. But we can vote them out of office.

Voting isn't meant to grant them power; it's meant to be a check on their power.

They do work for us. Look at SOPA. Once it became clear that it had the potential to be a national issue (i.e. might cost them votes), various senators and representatives began to publicly voice concerns about passing it.

Change isn't easy, but it can be effected.

There are two issues that I think that are important to keep in mind though.

The first big story here is the extent to which the US government has been (and continues to) compel big internet businesses and telco's to do their spying for them. This is an important thing to keep in mind, and I think that it is important when we look at what products we as founders develop. One of the huge threats that Google poses is the degree to which disparate sources of tracking information are tied together. With Android, for example, your cell phone is connected to an email address.

The second is the degree to which companies are being forced to make things intelligence-friendly. Here I think another point here is to build products which are intelligence-unfriendly as a way of pushing back. I have some ideas for start-ups I would be interested in participating in, in this area. My time availability is less than I would like but....

The first would be a verifiable secure telephony platform, resistant to in the middle eavesdropping, ideally incorporated in a country with strong protections for such things (Switzerland sounds nice).

The second would be decentralized cryptography services of some sort.

All projects I think would have to be open source because this would help put pressure on governments not to interfere.

We always have a choice to elect the people we want. The problem is that all the people who we want to elects are all lizards. If we elect a politician who actually have integrity and wisdom, he would be very unpopular and voted out of office.

The politicians that the people want in office is not the same person that you want to work under or believe in.