• Daniel Soar · How to Get Ahead at the NSA · LRB 24 October 2013
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/daniel-soar/how-to-get-ahead-at-the-nsa

    If you’re not exhausted by or indifferent to the endless revelations about the NSA – another week, another codename, another programme to vacuum up and analyse the world’s communications – then you’ve probably long since drawn a single general conclusion: we’re all being watched, all the time. You may also think this is something we sort of knew anyway. Perhaps you see ubiquitous spying as a function of the post-9/11 authoritarian state, which gathers knowledge by any means possible in order to consolidate its control, and which sees us all as potential suspects. Or perhaps you think that if the state is going to have a chance of keeping us safe from bad guys it obviously has to have the latitude to look for them: it isn’t interested in your research into 13th-century frescoes or cheap tights, but it needs to monitor all internet activity so that it can detect that rare occasion when someone searches for the materials to make hexamethylene triperoxide diamine bombs

    #NSA #Snowden #Big_Brother

    • Every time one of the spies’ methods comes under the spotlight, questions of legality arise. The law is changed, purportedly to stop such abuses happening again. But inevitably the new law includes a new route by which some version of the old system is made valid again, and a programme that once had to be kept highly secret can be discussed in public as much as you like. In response to the Snowden revelations, a new bill has been put forward, the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act. It sounds benign, but if you’re of a paranoid disposition, you have reason to fear what it might bring.