Note: Sorry for the
extremely late reply. I tried staying up-to-date in the beginning of the week but I simply had too much to do.
Quote:
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I've read the statements of the Pirate Party, for example. They see Big Brother in every stop sign. They live in the mistaken fantasy that somewhere, someone in a little room with a camera is watching each and every one of them, writing down their every move, and waiting for the moment when they can push their little button, and their subject will be dragged off to the stockade for the inevitable decade of torture before finally being shot as a traitor for throwing gum on the sidewalk. And they are based in Sweden, likely one of the most liberal and free of countries on the planet! Those guys need to find themselves a little island to play Lord of the Flies on, and give the rest of us a break.
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This is one of the fundamental disputes between the two "crowds", so I need to pick it up again, sorry.
Unfortunately, your core assumption is no longer true: Someone is monitoring
you specifically and it is difficult/prohibitively expensive.
Probably just a generation ago, surveillance was hard/expensive enough to need specific reasons to be worthwhile. With the advances in computing and storage technology, this is no longer true. It is no longer infeasible to simply collect just about any information you can get your hands on and perform data-mining on it when you need info. Completely automated. Especially on the Internet, as everything is already digital.
Just this week, ISPs in the UK and the US admitted to spying on their customers for advertising reasons. In the US, roughly 100k customers are affected, in the UK (BT) some 10k's. The method used is dubbed "deep-packet inspection" which means the ISPs do not just look at the packet header but scan the entire contents of all packets you send.
This means:
- All websites you visit are known to your ISP, including usage patterns
- Related to the above, all content you watch is known to your ISP
- All emails/webmails/chats are known to your ISP, unless you use encryption and the ISP isn't hacking that connection (where possible)
- All forum posts are known to your ISP
- Your ISP may inject data into your connection (adverts in this case, but trojans is possible as well and has been publicized before)
- ...
All this they did for advertising, meaning
for profit. You could pair this with credit-card history from your bank, customer cards for your mall, mobile usages from your mobile phone company and get an extremely accurate description of your life over the past months or years, depending on the storage times. For businesses this may be illegal (even in the US?) but the government has less restrictions. Not to mention the RFID tags in all your stuff. Again, this is what surveillance state means.
An other prime example is Google; they store
all search queries for a number of years. They have superposed a search structure over the/large parts of the internet. Surveillance information is much more focused and coherent.
I'm not paranoid but I did study computer science and my minor just happens to be information security and privacy.
Edit: \o/ no more mod checking!