In light of Snowden revelations - have you changed?

You are 1 person out of so many others. You are not a national threat (hopefully). You are not a President (are you?). You are not Prince William or Kate Middleton. Neither are you Justin Bieber nor Lady Gaga for that matter.

Yes, surveillance is rampant and annoying. Yes, it infringes your rights. If you grant me the luxury of words, I might even say it rapes your soul and keeps you in a perpetual nightmare.

BUT let's get back to Earth and put our feet on the ground. For the most part, it is mass data collection. Your data is a note in a huge collection of albums and soundtracks. Too many genre...there's music for everyone. Yet, we don't listen to all of them, do we? As long as you don't attract too much attention to yourself, nobody is that interested to know everything that goes on in your life. Everyone is busy looking at themselves. Be worried but don't waste your life being paranoid beyond sanity. Once in a while, put that tinfoil hat away....your head and hair will thank you for that.

 

^ Still not gonna uncover the webcam and leave the option of viewing me in the privacy of my home to their whim ...

(not even for the sake of "national security")

 

I've made no changes, except using Tor a little more often.

But then, none of the Snowden revelations were really news for me.

 

Doctor PC,
Very nicely said, especially the list of items that make you a potential terrorist or adversary. What amazes me is that people can look at a list like that and not see the common threads running through them. It's reached the point that any activity that adversely affects big money's bottom line in the slightest degree or makes you less dependent on them makes you a threat. Add in the fact that the NSA has and is engaging in spying for the benefit of corporations. It's quite clear who they work for. The thought of losing any amount of control, power, or profit terrorizes big money. Therefore anyone whose actions can potentially cause any of those items is a potential terrorist. As for being on their watch lists, I'd rather be on those than on a list of sheep. I've been on their lists since the Diebold Accuvote controversy.

This applies to individuals as well. My Tor exit node for instance runs on DSL. The bandwidth it contributes is insignificant, but it has been up 99% of the time since last summer. For the NSA, it's another IP they have to monitor. For me, it's my way of protesting. It might not contribute much, but it's more effective than signing online petitions that they'll ignore. It's the same with my choosing to close my bank accounts and my refusal to use the debit card. I use cash for 2 primary reasons.
1, To keep the financial institutions out of the picture.
2, It's my way of saying that it's none of their business what I do with my income.

We are all just one person. Individually, none of us can do anything. That's exactly how they want each of us to feel, alone and powerless. What people need to understand and remember is that we're far from alone. We outnumber them. Combined, we have more resources than they do. We already have the tools we need to castrate their ability to effectively surveil us. We just need the backbone to say "We've had enough" and use them in masse.

 

Very well said, the entire quote. The bolded parts express much of why I'm a vegetarian. (Well, a half-assed one -- I still eat eggs, dairy, and fish but no beef, pork, or chicken.) It's not that I'm opposed so much to family farms, to someone raising a pig and then one day going out back, putting a bullet in its head and butchering it, as I am to the corporate factory farming environments where the animals' suffering is worse than their deaths. And yes, I know there are still extreme ethical issues when it comes to dairy and egg production, but I'm trying to minimize my support and funding of factory farming to the best of my ability. If everyone were to try to do the best that he can when it comes to things like this -- and that's probably better than he's doing now -- the world would be that much better and moving in the right direction. Sometimes people will ask, "If you're a vegetarian for ethical reasons why are you still wearing that leather belt?" Well, if it's someone who genuinely wants to know, I tell him there's room for improvement and that I'm trying the best I can. If it's someone who just wants to mock me, I tell him it's because I'm a hypocrite, and that always shuts him up.

As for banks, I hate them and haven't had a bank account in more than a decade. Banks are the government's collaborator-superspies, and I refuse to help them track me like that. I also don't want to add deposits onto their books. While I can't control what someone I pay does with the money -- maybe he'll deposit it in a bank -- I can control what I do.

 

One more thing that I changed. I have my webcam covered with black tape. As far as banking and so, Im just forced to use them but I will take my business out of U.S. as much as I can and I already did. I pay $20 a year for my runbox account. Sure you can say that's almost nothing but that's $20 a year that gmail doesn't get from me by selling my info to the highest bidder. Now given enough people that $20 a year can change to 200 million a year. Same goes for microsoft, I will not longer pay them for the office suite, I will no longer buy their software and that's another ~$40 a year for a total of $60 a year. And now throw in another $10 a year that I don't spend on AVs... And now given enough people this can quickly change to corporations loosing a billion per year. And that is not a small amount of money.

As for banking, I will probably settle down with a small start up bank, even if I have to pay for having my money there. Some things, you just don't want to live without out of the pure convenience. And if I can stick it up to the big banks by supporting a small start up company I will be happy to do that in the U.S. world of monopolies and lobbyist.

 

I started shaving, bathing & living indoors again. Thanks Edward now they're no longer looking for me!

 

No change

 

Little or no change.

 

I don't pose a threat to the NSA.....the US of A.....nor even my neighbor! – I don't have a missile battery in my backyard – nor even an A-tom bomb in the boot of my vehicle! So I have no fear of being spied upon.

The short answer is – NO!....I've changed nothing!

 

You live in this society, you are watched by the big brothers. No way to escape from this. Live with it people, unless you are going "into the wild" and become a caveman.

 

I changed nothing, because it already worked perfectly.

 

You already mentioned the magic threat words. You are now being spied upon.

 

Everyone here is spied upon

 

That's OK! – my activities are sooo boring that any listeners will nod off into a coma within 5 minutes!

 

I have not changed anything. I was already aware of everything that Snowden leaked. I just didn't have a name to pin to the program within the NSA that was responsible for doing it. I think most people in the Security Community was not surprised at all.

 

Well my activities are interesting. I hope those ~ Snipped as per TOS ~ write a book about it.

 

The spying itself wasn't a surprise to me. The extent and some of the methods revealed were eye openers. The revelations by themselves didn't cause me to change anything specific, but in several cases they helped me make decisions on specific items that I was undecided about. At one point I was considering carrying a cellphone. The revelations regarding their tracking and exploitability helped make my decision to not use one. The revelations regarding the monitoring of online multiplayer gaming influenced my decision with those. For quite a while I enjoyed one particular multiplayer game. At the same time, I was disappointed with myself because of the amount of time I was wasting there. In addition, my PC and internet service weren't capable of handling that game and running a Tor relay at the same time. The revelations helped me decide that running a Tor exit was more important than that game. Thanks in part to the revelations, I'm not wasting all those hours in an imaginary world any more.

That's expected. That fact should have no effect on those who value their freedom or privacy. A few of their sock puppets have shown up here on occasion as well. Fortunately they're not that hard to pick out.

 

I apologize for my language, I got carried away.

 

For the users that think Switzerland or other EU countries are safer than U.S. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/switzerland-wont-save-you-either-why-e-mail-might-still-be-safer-in-us/

 

Actually, EU countries are safer for a EU citizen from a certain perspective: if something happens in the US, an EU citizen has no way to protect his/her rights whatsoever. But if something similar happens in one of the EU countries (and I am sure it does happen) there is at least a theoretical possibility to fight back.
I think the same thing applies to the US as well. You have (a bit) more leverage on the situation inside US if you are a US citizen.

 

Who said Switzerland was better? There are good countries to do business with, and I don't consider Switzerland to be in the top 10.

I pretty much knew most/all of the Snowden type crap was going on, probably over a decade ago. My changes amount more to protesting than actual security changes. But now I audit a bit more, and take a bit more precautions in other areas. But overall, the basics aren't changed. I did dump most US-based companies for products/services related to PC, especially security.

 

With data storage, choices based on host country are nearly futile. Asking which is more privacy friendly is like asking which AV is better. The answer is constantly changing. For all practical purposes, the problem is global. Few if any countries are escaping this problem.

Choosing what software to use and "trust" has almost become a matter of who do you distrust the least. In almost all cases, that decision is going to be a tradeoff. Each of us has to choose the criteria that matters most to them.

 

~Comment removed. Politics.~
My changes are don't trust gov or the "other Man"

 

From a recent Guardian article:


"Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called 'upstream' collection of communications moving across the internet.

"Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the 'full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,' De replied: 'Yes.'

"When the Guardian and the Washington Post broke the Prism story in June, thanks to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had 'never heard' the term Prism."


These companies are clearly liars and traitors to the American people. They would have been at the front of the line to put in their bids to construct the Third Reich's gas chambers and concentration camps, because it would have been their "patriotic duty," "necessary for 'national security,'" "required by law," and "________________________ (insert any other traitorous justification here)."