Using encryption? That means the US spooks have you on file Anyone who encrypts their emails or uses secure instant message services runs the risk of having their communications stored by the US National Security Agency, according to the latest leaks from former NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. The Guardian has published two more explosive documents which set out what sort of information …
Playing devils advocate here......
If you own a msartphone, have an online presence, use a supermarket loyalty card, then i think you have to accept that you are consenting to surrendering at least some of your privacy. And if you have been doing the above for anumber of years already, it's probably too late to stop your details being logged if not looked at.
That being said, I don't think Government should be able to slurp data on the industrial scale that it appears to be doing so at present. It's equally not defensible to suggest that it's soley to combat "terrorism". As the very definition of "Terrorism" can change. Today it's largely inferred to be Islamist terrorists. Tomorrow it could be you or I, simply because we don;t like the current government of the day.
Can't see that using encryption is going to be worse than sending traffic unencrypted. Yes it might flag a trigger, but unless they demand to nsee your private key they won;t be reading it.
Also, I think considering just how far removed from sanity and democracy our respective governments seem to be moving, people like Brad Manning and Ed Snowden are more important than ever before.
One thing that the NSA has to watch for is not monitoring US citizens.
The reason isn't a question of niceness or nastiness, it's a question of law.
Most germane is the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the military from operating in any police activity inside of the US.
Of course, one also has to recall how often such laws were thoroughly ignored in the US, such as CIA operations inside of the US through the 1970's, before Congress put that shenanigans to a stop.
They all cry and whine that they need this for fighting terrorism, but at the same time they stand against any provision to make sure the data can only be used for fighting terrorism, and can't be used for anything else. Clearly they are using it for other things.
We have had enough of their nonsense. That's fine if they want to keep everything because effective immediately, we are encrypting EVERYTHING, and we considder government documents to be suspect and subject to publication.
Laws be damned.
"We have had enough of their nonsense. That's fine if they want to keep everything because effective immediately, we are encrypting EVERYTHING, and we considder government documents to be suspect and subject to publication."
Then what happens when the government fires up their black-project ("it doesn't even exist") quantum computer and start cracking all the communications they've been keeping backlogged in Utah en masse (since post-quantum encryption wasn't and still isn't the norm)? Then they wouldn't care if you encrypted everything; they'll be able to read most of it ANYWAY.
Then we need to encrypt absolutely everything that can be encrypted. The sheer volume of data that flows over the internet would too much for even the NSA to store. They have to justify their budget to someone - asking for another billion dollars worth of hard drives is going to cost some political favors.
Black projects are on a strictly need-to-know basis. And they DO intend to store ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING—encrypted or not. Last I heard, their storage capacity was in the yottabyte range if not greater. They're also holding the encrypted stuff for when code breakers catch up (that's where the theoretical black-project quantum computer comes into play, and they may already have it. How long were they in service before the SR-71 and F-117 became public knowledge?). As for the budget, just say, "They're planning something worse than 9/11" or "They've got a nuke and plan to use it over South Dakota" and that should scare anybody into giving them anything they want. Nothing like an existential threat to loosen the purse strings.
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