
Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy - mgunes
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/information-consumerism-the-price-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html
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Create
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question
whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with
the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States
government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

[http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html](http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html)

[http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-
of-t...](http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-
requires-free-media)

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lukifer
It's Sun Tzu 101: information is power. Massive, pre-emptive data warehousing
is a weapon of unprecedented scale, which tilts the balance of power between
<s>government</s> institutions and citizens.

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hipsters_unite
The most striking thing about this article is probably the main image. It
almost perfectly captures implicitly all of the outrage of the tech community
over the NSA dragnet. All the hypocrisy in one neat picture.

~~~
Joeboy
I was also struck by that image, but the rest of the article is very good too.

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ballard
IANAL but I know plenty:

US jurisprudence has a primary flaw when comes to privacy: individuals have no
rights to most of their own data. Once it is "out there," it's available to be
bought and sold without much limitation. A friend is working on a paper in
this area to find a way out of this quagmire, but I think it will take a great
outrage (ie a heinous crime) to make any progress.

~~~
reeses
There's a horrid and eroding legal concept called a "reasonable expectation of
privacy."

Unfortunately, it is not referred to in the positive in most cases. On the
contrary, it is invoked in the negative based on some legal precedent that
eliminates that "reasonable expectation."

~~~
lukifer
I've long wondered if there isn't a potential legal hack hiding there:
Providers that advertise an expectation of privacy, webmail with a "This is a
private message" checkbox, those (generally pointless) email footers that
clarify that the message is intended for its recipient only, etc. (IANAL...)

Obviously, in the current court system it wouldn't do much good on its own,
but it could form the backbone of a single precedent-setting case.

