A Peculiar Blog

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the fact that there are government agencies doing a lot of snooping on all manner of Internet traffic.  It’s also safe to say that since 9-11 this snooping has escalated massively.  Now, the FBI is trying to get access to data that the NSA has been collecting from the Internet backbone (servers through which ALL Internet traffic passes through) so that they can look for criminal activity.

The problem with this is that they’re apparently not just limiting this to justifiable searches and evidence gathering in the course of an ongoing investigation.  This is a lot more “Big Brother” in nature, scanning data looking for things that they can then investigate and prosecute as crimes.  As if they don’t already have enough active cases to work on.

The problems with this kind of thing are many, most of which have to do with the fact that it blows all sorts of holes in people’s right to privacy.  It also means that it becomes more and more necessary to watch what you say online because you never know when “Big Brother” is watching and what he may decide is a sign that you’re on the wrong side of the law.

It means that people need to take active steps to maintain privacy.  The first thing to remember is that the online world has always been subject to people being able to snoop.  While it’s generally a good practice to never write anything online that you wouldn’t want posted on a billboard where everyone in town can read it, it’s also sometimes necessary to communicate privately.

This is why I think that everybody should take a little bit of time to get and learn how to use some basic privacy tools.  Like for example, users of the Thunderbird mail client could get GnuPG and the Enigmail plugin and learn how to send encrypted and / or signed emails.  Maintaining safe browsing practices, never entering important passwords on un-trusted computers. (and untrusted means something that you’re not in control of what’s on it)

As for the FBI’s quest for access to still more information about everybody and their habits.  This needs to be stopped, the problem is that too many people are either ignorant of or foolishly unconcerned about things like this until it’s too late.

Technorati Tags: encryption, security, fbi, nsa, internet+backbone, domestic+spying, gnupg, enigmail, safe+computing, privacy