The GCHQ Revelations

Is that a giant eyeball? Oh, come on!

If you need some scary reading material to keep you up at night, let me recommend the story in the Guardian today from Henry Porter. It's about the GCHQ Revelations - and about how who controls the internet will (or does) control everyone.

If you think loss of privacy is a price worth paying for security, ask what a totally monitored future would look like.

'This is for everyone" was the message that flashed around the Olympic Stadium, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, was revealed hunched over a computer in the London 2012 opening ceremony. With Edward Snowden's latest dramatic leak that the British GCHQ and the US's NSA are executing a plan – codenamed MTI, or Mastering the Internet – to collect a significant amount of the world's communications, that generous slogan, which applied as much to the web as the spirit of the Games, now has a rather sinister undertone. The web is for everyone and so, we learn, is surveillance.

Britain and the US have boasted of their democratic virtues for generations and they also gave the internet to the world – the Americans providing the network and the British the idea. But now the two countries are rapidly perfecting a surveillance system that will allow them to capture and analyse a large quantity of international traffic consisting of emails, texts, phone calls, internet searches, chat, photographs, blogposts, videos and the many uses of Google.

Read more ....

It is a sober analysis on what the future may hold. Read it all!