The confirmation that there can be no expectation of privacy has destroyed a lot of the joy of internet use for me as well. At a more pressing existential level, it's making me despise working in web development. I may never work on a project 'noteworthy' enough to warrant the NSA seeing some use in collecting data from it, but I am firmly in the startup minded 30ish crowd willfully slaving away the prime of my life making tools and sites that encourage people to use and trust this byzantine conduit of an internet thoroughly infested with spooks gleefully abusing power and destroying privacy more and more every day.

Edit: perhaps research and training in security and seeing how I can contribute on that front is the first step back towards being proud of my work...?

> Edit: perhaps research and training in security and seeing how I can contribute on that front is the first step back towards being proud of my work...?

Well. The open-source tools might be as easy as the professional tools to taint.

Someone training for the CCNA/P-Security or any other certifications is still using the same corrupted conduits :(

William Gibson said this about virtual lights (a novel which deals with bike messengers and data): "In the future, information'll be more secure when written on paper and transported by physical human hands than on the wired."

Which reminds me of this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11325452

And there is work to do : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

Hyperboria is a technology that is in it's infancy, and is currently woefully underdeveloped. If you don't like contributing to the development of the Internet, maybe you could contribute instead to another network that runs a little less parallel to the United States?

I feel the same way. Besides the fact that I think the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act are disgusting, unconstitutional laws, at least let that be Americans' problem. If they are fine with it, so be it (they really shouldn't be, though).

But in no way do I find acceptable that just because I'm using an American service, the US has access at will to all my data. I think it's common sense that there should be international treaties that state that "if you want my citizen's data, then you have to ask me first (the local government)".

Stuff like that is what (maybe) will restore some trust in US companies in the future, but it's only one small step of the many steps needed to be taken to ensure the protection of both Americans and foreigners' privacy.

The way I see it, foreigners with data on American corporations' servers should be more protected than American citizens, not less, because I'm not their damn citizen, so they have no business scooping up all my data when they want to! At least that's how they should approach this if they still care about the "economy" and their corporations' welfare.

EU and UN also need to speak up more and say that this whole NSA spying thing is infringing on everyone's human rights for privacy. I feel this argument is being used very little right now, because I do think having private communications goes well beyond just one country's Constitution.

That's rich. You can be imprisoned by your own UK government for having a file of random numbers and "refusing" to give the encryption key that doesn't exist, and neither citizens nor travelers have the right to even remain silent.

I think this anti-USA kick is misplaced anger about your own governments being happily in cahoots. Do you think US strong-armed UK into house arresting Assange or interrogating Miranda? The UK/USA liaisons are probably high-fiving each other over these things.

Germany apparently was using XKEYSCORE, but oh my where could that data have come from? The information fairy came and put it under their pillow!

Come on. Your governments are just as bad or worse and that's why these revelations are so troubling for you.

You may be right but then again you might be wrong. I'd rather not psychoanalyze in the middle of a discussion. The universal police with a 10-year long jail with no trial is there, and it is not the UK's or Spain for that matter.

But I digress.

I have to say that even for someone like myself who considers himself very America friendly for personal, cultural and historical reasons, it is very hard to stomach the kind of attitude coming from the US right now.

The president and the NSA are basically saying, don't worry, we're not running a dragnet data mining operation that covers everything and everyone and violates your most basic privacy rights, unless you happen not to be a US person.

We seem to be at a rather dangerous stage within that process of globalization if a profound sense of injustice and inequality spreads beyond a small group of radicalized fanatics right into the mainstream of many societies around the world.

There are many benefits to having some cultural commons, a language that everyone knows, some common ideas about what's right and wrong. I'd hate to see the world slide into the kind of void that followed the decline of the Roman Empire, or worse some kind of global apartheid state.

"I almost feel like the using the internet is the same as traveling to the US, which is something I would never ever do."

Seriously, you're so terrified of traveling to the US? Give me a break man, the UK government has done plenty of scary things and have been complicit and willful participants in the sort of surveillance the NSA is conducting. Are you hiding under your bed at night then, because if you're scared just to travel in the US I would feel you should be just as terrified living in your own country.

I'm going to be in the UK in a few weeks, maybe I should be concerned I'll be detained for 9 hours without access to a lawyer and my laptop, phone, and other electronics confiscated for no reason other then some nebulous pretense that I could be associated with terrorists?

While I'm seriously concerned about the what the NSA is doing some of the language I've seen here borders a bit on the ridiculous. I don't think anyone should legitimately terrified to the point of not wanting to travel in any of these places quite yet, as opposed to lets say Eygpt, where there are more real dangers and a seriously corrupt government and police state. A bit more on the rational side figuring out which encryption technologies the NSA has compromised (http://bit.ly/17botWf) and not using them might be a more valuable use of your time.

The fun you'd been having at the web services party was facilitated by denial. The software community has wasted the past several years focusing on flawed technologies, and has now built up a dependency on easy VC money (which only flows with the promise of creating new middlemen) and the glamor it brings.

The way to repent is by migrating to securable[0] technologies where possible, and deprecating insecure ones by treating them as prima facie compromised. Yes, this means giving up the unthinking conveniences you've probably become accustomed to. For instance, if you care about the security of "your data", you simply cannot have unfettered access on a contemporary mobile phone. For that capability to be created, we have to stop pretending that it already exists. Otherwise, the demand shifts towards MHz+eyecandy bumps instead of for phones that create security for their users.

[0] The primary thing for a secure technology is not to be assuredly secure, but for it to have a design goals that are compatible with security. For instance, OpenSSH may still have gaping holes in it. But when these are discovered, they are considered unambiguous bugs and they're patched to be closer to the platonic. A system that relies on storing plaintext or equivalents on someone else's server can never be patched to fix this.

So what you're saying is something like "no litigation without representation"?

At some level I'm very disappointed and depressed by the revelations, even though I'm not surprised and had suspected much of it, since it 'seemed' possible, and these agencies are in a continuous arms race largely of their own paranoid invention (although I would argue that the CIA does more than it's fair share to ensure that foreign meddling is a reality that the world has to deal with). This is why I think the story about adversary roadmaps being affected is largely nonsense; many, many hackers have known about these possibilities for a long time.

I feel like a lot of businesses and VC funds have intentionally tried to push towards collecting as much user data and communications as possible, knowing how valuable it will be not only for advertising and genuine business, but also for national and international security, a world of secret dollars and prop-ups for important data stations.

Maybe that's me pushing too much complicity where none exists, but I honestly get the feeling that there must have been enough people with experience of communications interception history in S.V. (IT, telecoms, communications have existed for a long time before Internet startups, and will have been doing similar things during the cold war) to know that this was going to be a big trend. They would have been able to least slightly influence the recent trends towards 'openness' and 'social sharing', which neatly leverage narcissism, human psychology, and network effects to draw people in (and promote consumerism as a side benefit).

The inward-looking nature of the U.S. is definitely a concern as well - there's still certainly a huge amount of naivety about the rest of the world and the way things work elsewhere, even in cultured circles where people travel -- ultimately the news and media still set a lot of opinions. There is an awareness that many things operate differently in other countries, but very often only a miniscule understanding of different cultures (socialized healthcare being a long-running example).

So yes, it is very annoying that so much data travels over U.S. links, and that there is so much focus on how everything is OK, because the U.S. works hard to avoid spying on it's own citizens -- when that is just a tiny proportion of the world population, which is broadly innocent. At near enough a billion users, a huge proportion of Facebook users have no protection from this at all - and so any upcoming politicians in other countries are completely open to access, presumably.

I would disagree slightly on the point regarding other countries - I honestly think that on the whole, the U.S. does still respect free speech and has a bit of an edge on other countries in terms of liberties, but the trends are very worrying, and what will be important is how it reacts as a country to legitimate attempts to understand, curtail, and avoid all this surveillance.

All this said, I'm an eternal optimist - I think we have the tools to build very good secure communications, and I think we can do it with distributed systems. We can now transfer value without banks using bitcoin, route traffic very ambiguously and easily using Tor, encrypt and send messages anonymously using bitmessage/PGP/etc. It is possible to get off Gmail and Facebook, we just need to make it easier to do so, and provide the functionality that everyone expects in a more distributed setting.

There's a lot of work to make it all easy to use safely (even for hackers, but then for everyone), and then a lot more work to get it adopted widely, but I think there will be a huge appetite for it now, and I think it can be done. The more revelations that appear and the more that the realities of centralization and surveillance become part of the public understanding, the easier it'll be to persuade people to use secure services -- and crucially, the better people will be able to critique the vulnerabilities of them.

Money and marketing are a huge force multiplier for centralized services (especially if they have state-level support), but ultimately as long as the Internet is there and allows us to communicate, eventually we'll figure this stuff out and build the tools we need.

I agree with you for the most part, except for your concern about not having a vote on laws that effect you. In America, voting is a placebo. It has been effectively neutered of all potency or threat to the political regime. Do you believe that things would be different if Americans elected John McCain in 2008 or Romney in 2012?

All politicians draw from the same pool of bureaucrats and advisors. They all went to the same schools, mostly in the Northeast United States. Every member of the President's board of economic advisors has been from a school in Cambridge, MA since the turn of the millennium.

Only 2,000 jobs are elected or politically appointed out of a federal bureaucracy numbering over 2.5 million people. We could give the Brits a vote in American elections and it simply wouldn't make any difference. Democracy has been successfully tamed by politicians.

You are raving. Every society has thoughtcrimes—no sensible person voted for them, civil liberties do not apply, and there is no recourse or appeal.

All the U.S. influence means is that you now have to check CNN.com as well as the Daily Mail. If CNN has weeks of coverage of new anti-tomato laws, move your pro-tomato website to a non-American server. For the most part, the CIA is just a bunch of fashion-conscious hipsters with really cool spy shit. Avoid whatever is unfashionable and you're safe.

If you really want to worry about government surveillance, worry about one of your friends drinking an epic amount of cider and deciding to use your bank card on a kiddie porn website as a lark. The NSA's influence is nothing compare to what your local thoughtcrime enforcers do.