G+_Blair Skinner Posted September 7, 2013 Share Posted September 7, 2013 Will Wheaton likes Jeff Jarvis post Leo should get Will to come on Twit Originally shared by Wil Wheaton Really insightful and thought-provoking article by Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian. (Hashtags added by me): It has been said that #privacy is dead. Not so. It's #secrecy that is dying. Openness will kill it. American and British spies undermined the secrecy and security of everyone using the internet with their efforts to foil #encryption . Then, Edward #Snowden foiled them by revealing what is perhaps – though we may never know – their greatest secret. When I worried on Twitter that we could not trust encryption now, technologist Lauren Weinstein responded with assurances that it would be difficult to hide "backdoors" in commonly used #PGP encryption – because it is open-source. Openness is the more powerful weapon. Openness is the principle that guides, for example, Guardian journalism. Openness is all that can restore trust in government and technology companies. And openness – in standards, governance, and ethics – must be the basis of technologists' efforts to take back the the net. [...] The agglomeration of data that makes us fear for our privacy is also what makes it possible for one doubting soul – one Manning or Snowden – to learn secrets. The speed of data that makes us fret over the the devaluation of facts is also what makes it possible for journalists' facts to spread before government can stop them. The essence of the Snowden story, then, isn't government's threat to privacy, so much as it is government's loss of secrecy. Oh, it will take a great deal for government to learn that lesson. Its first response is to try to match a loss of secrecy with greater secrecy, with a war on the agents of openness: #whistleblowers and journalists and news organizations. President #Obama had the opportunity to meet Snowden's revelations – redacted responsibly by the Guardian – with embarrassment, apology, and a vow to make good on his promise of transparency. He failed. But the agents of openness will continue to wage their war on secrecy. [...] This latest story demonstrates that the Guardian, now in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, as well as publications in Germany and Brazil that have pursued their own surveillance stories, will continue to report openly in spite of government acts of intimidation. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/06/nsa-surveillance-welcome-end-secrecy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Chris Wood Posted September 7, 2013 Share Posted September 7, 2013 Wil was on TWiT a while ago, but only for half an episode. I don't think Dvorak really liked him that much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Stephen Styffe Posted September 7, 2013 Share Posted September 7, 2013 It is the end of secrecy as long as you don't know how to cover your tracks. But geeks know how to cover their tracks. (I.e. use a non-U.S. based VPN, sign your email with PGP, encrypt everything you have using Truecrypt before uploading it to a cloud service and not uploading the key, use a virtual machine and modify the user agent for the browser you're using.) Using those methods, you have practically made it impossible for the NSA to snoop on your data. At least for the time being. And if you're using solid encryption (like Leo using 4096 bits in his PGP key), then it will be a while before your privacy is invaded. Sure, it isn't possible to have perfect secrecy. But you can make it practically impossible for the NSA to snoop on you...at least for the time being. With that said, most people don't know how to do that and wouldn't have the will power to do that. So for them...yes, secrecy is dead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John short (shorty) Posted September 8, 2013 Share Posted September 8, 2013 John C Dvorak is the coolest curmudgeon on the internet Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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