Most of us would have suspected that the whole internet surveillance thing has been going on for years. Now that it’s more or less been confirmed it seems the NSA for example seeks increase their powers in terms of looking into our personal info.
I understand their argument cannot be ignored ,however, given that we’ve become so dependent on the internet, could these be early signs that freedom online may be nearing its end or is this just progress?
I personally am not a big fan.
Anyway, how do you guys feel about this whole issue?
Also has the backdoor issues with cloud computing changed your opinion about cloud storage etc.?

I like knowing what my fellow GOGers are thinking

I really don't understand why 50 people watching 7 billon is an issue ... do you really think your secrets are that important to them ? Of course I'm not the one 'paying' them for this kind of job, and the chance that my neighbour works at the NSA and have access to personnal stuff is very slight .....

Let them look at my information. A few hundred beaver shots and some game walkthroughs is all they'll find.

We're thinking about GOG

I don't have any secrets stashed away in my room and I'm still not inviting random G-Men in to rummage through all my shit. It's called privacy. Unless they have actual (as in "backed up with solid facts") reason to believe that I'm involved in terrorist activity against the US they need to stay the FUCK away from my data. You can't just subject innocent people to methods that are legally reserved for people who are already under substanciated suspicion. By just scanning all data period, they are violating one of the most basic principles of the justice system.

tl;dr: Fuck you, NSA! Fuck you very much!

I am not comfortable with the vision of future where it's competely normal to spy on anything private. Humans are species that forms hierarchical structure and only more or less morally ruthless (read effective) people made it up to the top.

I'm supposed to give them a cut from my monthly salary, so a bunch of unguarded people can spy on anyone they want and basically do whatever they want with the information. Remember, this is hierarchical society, so the top isn't controlled by anyone.

And the old tired kinderporno argument is just tiring. I have heard so many BS how spying on civilians' personal computers saves lifes while criminal organizations calmly use TOR and same civilians' computers as nodes.

And attitude of people around me is just saddening. When SOPA was about to be approved, so many of them had said it's perfectely normal to be frisked and asked to show a random employee of private company a content of their computer disk because they didn't have nothing to hide. Yeah, right, like this kind of thing can lead to only good things. Would have anyone frisked top dogs?

Although I'm not comfortable with someone having access to my activity, my concerns are also that it's the first step to more intrusive surveillance. Also, records being stored sends shivers dowm my spine. Every single industry has people who abuse their position - so who's to say that it won't eventually lead to digging deep enough to make an individual fit a crime?

It's no different than having someone looking over my shoulder whilst I type - it's just available remotely.

I know there's a fine line between true freedom and chaos but this particular revelation/confirmation of record snooping in the name of "protecting our society" is a control that I'd prefer not to be there....and I'll take the risk.

Actually I'm the one in charge of reporting what is being said on the gog forums.

I don't think it's necessarily that the average person does anything so vile they'd want to hide it, but for a lot of people it's just the principle, like, whatever happened to probable cause/warrants, needing a reason to gather information other than "Well, let's just grab it all and see what happens"?

Growing up, most kids get pissed off at their own parents for being too nosy, but as adults, many seem to say "Oh well, no biggie" to what our government does.

Some argue "Go ahead, I've got nothing to hide." Until they do. And then where would they be? Apparently a large number of people don't seem to care that they are mindless sheep being herded around.

"Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free." -H.L. Mencken

This is a nice site if you want to read some things that most likely won't be found in too many other places:

http://cryptome.org/


edit: and how about those Lowe's commercials? "We store your information so you can remember what you bought last year!" And they make it sound so cheery. Innocuous? Perhaps.

And where I work, when someone comes back to the lumber yard to pick something up, it has complete name, address, and telephone number. Is this really necessary to go buy a few pieces of wood? If I wanted to, I could say "Hold on a moment", step into the guard shack, and write everything down. There. I have all I need to start messing around.

The problem is, that we all have seen just a glimpse of what is going on. We've only been shown some slides of the 41 slides by the media. We've seen no proof of the mentioned existing backdoors for data retrieval in widely used operating systems and applications, only Sn said that in the first video. Spiegel and other papers/news outlets also recevied documents, but none of them was shown in the media, you only got the story itself, at least in the news I've read.

In Germany they basically said, we do not know much, but everything is in accordance with the law. The revelation is downplayed by basically all European governments and the EU itself. The real outcry from politicians here in Germany was because of the bugs in the EU-Offices, and for such stuff -in my opinion- you have intelligence services to protect you from...

What makes me nervous is the reaction of the european governments to this revelation in context with this:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCkwQarlALU

A good objective analysis of the "disclosed" slides can be found here:

electrospaces.blogspot.de/

Ever since the neocons took over power the world is dealing with a lot worse group than some crazy islamic terrorists.
This whole surveilance thing is just another way for them to stay in power and they will keep on perfecting it until we haven't noticed that we are living under a totalitarian worldgoverment one day.

Man, this is all sounding too much like a bad George Lucas movie.

One or two pieces of information in isolation isn't that big of a deal in most cases. However, as you collect a larger number of pieces of data and taken from places where the person posting it was not considering it in the context of the other information, you can very quickly wind up with a huge amount of information that they wouldn't have knowingly given out.

But, worse is the crowd sourced spying where people are posting the dirt on other people without permission.

What personally concerns me is not knowing what, if any of this information, I'm going to want to keep secret in the future. Sure, it might be perfectly legal now to wear sunglasses in public, but what if that changes in the future and they can prosecute for past offenses?

Sure, that's a ludicrous example, but it's a big part of the problem.

Yes.
The problem with tight surveillance on citizens is that citizens need to know every law there is and they need to keep updated about changes in the laws and new ones.
I can guarantee you that there isn't a citizen on this earth in any country with a law system that isn't breaking the law all the time.

That's not what I was getting at, but yes that's true as well.

There's varying degrees to which that applies, but the attitude that ignorance is no excuse has never sat right with me. Especially in a country with a legal code as complex as the US' legal code. Even the people in charge of enforcing it don't always know what is and isn't legal.

And, I can only imagine what it's like in an old country or one where they change the laws to suit whatever the leaders want.

The whole "US is spying on the world!"-issue never interested me. Like, duh? Of course they do!

But I found the stories that US companies are willingly co-operating with the US officials to let them spy in their services and products far more interesting. So, when e.g. EU countries have been complaining to US government for this whole thing... they should have been directing the questions towards the suspected US companies instead.

Many countries (AFAIK at least e.g. US, India and Australia) seem to be rejecting or at least disliking the idea of letting Chinese telecom companies into the networks of the operators/ISPs on their soil, as they are suspecting the said companies are spying for the Chinese government. So, should similar suspicions be targeted to US companies from now on, e.g. here in EU? Keep Motorola, Google and Microsoft products and services out of our networks, as they are allegedly spying for the US government?