vineri, 28 iunie 2013

The goverment is spying us! What's new?

The recent scandal of PRISM US spy program, it is not a surprise Russia,China,Iran and former comunist countries, were people are used to be monitored overtly or discreet.
At least the tehnology has brought some improvement for authorities and for spyed alike.
Nowdays you don't hear anymore the click of the tape recorder when you pick up the phone.
Newtheir your letters are open by some bored clerk who doesn't bother to seal back the envelope.
Now the snoop discreetly in your Inbox.
Now you can chat freely with your friends, without fear that they will be snitches. The goverment doesn't need to bribe or to threaten a friend  to tell them what are your political view, your sexual habits or were have you been lately.
They can find out this by watching your internet activity.
No law, or commision can supervise what the field agents are doing, or what the private investigators are doing. You and the US goverment have the same problem: too many people with acces to your information.
The problem is what they are doing with all these information.
Somebody said that gathering all these data is useless, because even if you have 90% accuracy you can make a lot of mistakes.
Let's supose that you are profiling 10 milion people as possible terorist and only 1000 are real terorists.
So from 10 milion people you clasify 1 milion inocents as terorists and from 1000 terorist you clasify 100 terorists as innocents.
Overall you have to investigate 1000900 "terorists".
If you have a good judicial system maybe you will sue and convict 800 real terorists.
(I think they are 2 types of judicial systems: one in which you convict all the criminals and some inocents and one in which you convict no inocent but you let loose some criminals).
But if you have a "judicial" system Guantanamo style, you will have the prisons filled with inocents and a secret police rulling the country.
We cannot supervise the secret services because they act in shadow, but we can supervise the judicial system who works in plain sight.Or it should be.
Because of that I think that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden trial should be public.
The only difference between Rusia and USA regarding secret services is that in USA you have better judicial system to deal with these cases.
The failure of eastern empires was caused partly because they did everything in secret. There were no trial to protect the individual right and the justice, the sultan just ordered that somebody to be strangled.

Reading all the stuff about the omnipotence of the inteligence agencies, the ordinary citizen is feeling helpless and afraid.
So what should do then,the ordinary citizen?
Simple, lye.Nobody forces you to put real information on the internet.Use several accounts for different tasks. More chaotic you are, more errors you introduce in their database.

PS. If somebody reads that and has acces to my account, can you please correct my grammar and spelling mistakes? Thank you.




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