The NSA does read your email!
Yesterday, The Washington Post and The Guardian published articles saying that the NSA is systematically spying on everybody who is using US-resident services (Google, Apple, Facebook etc). It seems that not many people care (where is a huge outrage?), so maybe it is just as well. I remember the discussions at Brandeis about switching from their own email system to Google. We were told that academics get special treatment and will not be subject to the Google advertisement machine. This went away about a year ago. Now we learn that the US government also reads our emails. Anybody, who still cares?
I do think people care and
I do think people care and there is outrage out there. This has been headline news in many countries for days now.
I think Fahrad Manjoo has a good description of the balance of power involved and the trade-offs for consumers:
All that we know for sure is that the potential for abuse is staggering. Every day, most of us willingly carry around devices whose surveillance capacities would have been a gleam in the eye of any East German security official. Our machines know who we talk to, what we buy, who we worship, how we can be blackmailed, and they know where we are and everywhere we have ever been.
On the other hand, hey, you have a machine that will answer any question you’ve ever thought to ask, that will let you take pictures of every moment of your kid’s life, that will let call your long-lost relatives across the world for free. Thanks to massive data-mining, we may one day get self-driving cars and cures to genetic diseases.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/prism_apple…