Post Square 12.24.13 ~ Indoor Cat
After 9/11, President George W. Bush ordered the National
Security Agency to begin collecting data domestically without authority from
Congress or the courts. Since then, the NSA has compiled records of ordinary
people through hundreds of millions of email addresses, hundreds of billions of
cell phone locations and trillions of domestic call logs.
Edward Snowden, former contractor at NSA, saw this activity
as a “dangerous machine of mass surveillance” that was growing unchecked. He
approached his supervisors and co-workers about his concerns, but no one he
spoke to wanted to hear it.
Snowden knew he had to do something, even if it turned out
that the public didn’t share his views. He felt strongly that the government should
not know everything about everybody because it had the “power to take away life
and freedom”, and because he saw privacy as a universal right.
In June 2013 Snowden leaked documents to the press that
exposed the secret surveillance programs of the NSA. (And the shit hit the
fan.) The repercussions were felt in Congress, the courts, in popular media, Silicon Valley and around the world.
When all this happened Snowden knew he needed to get the
heck outta Dodge and fled to Russia,
where he was granted asylum for one year. He stays in his Moscow hotel, lives on ramen noodles and
chips, and is connected to the outside through the Internet. He describes his
life as that of an indoor cat.
The actions of Edward Snowden have undoubtedly done some
serious damage to America’s
ability to gather intelligence, showing our adversaries just what they need to
do to avoid being tracked. It is not apparent what NSA is doing differently at
this point. The agency can still collect data on anyone, but companies such as Google
and Yahoo are working on ways to make it harder for them.
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