Erstellt am: 7. 6. 2013 - 13:15 Uhr
Today's Webtip: NSA and online surveillance
I guess I have always been a bit paranoid. Growing up in the aftermath of Watergate, and cutting my activist teeth during the Iran Contra era made it a bit difficult to not see shadowy forces lurking just beneath the surface of current events.
Throw in the odd story about infiltration and spying upon domestic dissidents, yellow cake shenanigans, the lovely white paper released by the Project for the New American Century, and the revelation of Operation Northwoods and you have enough information to start making you question a lot of the information we are presented with.
It might not be enough to send one over the edge into the realm of Reptillians and the Illuminati, but for most practical purposes, that doesn't really matter. Being worried about Google's relationship to the NSA would have qualified you as a tinfoil-hatter not long ago, and people who were concerned about then candidate Obama's position on FISA were chronic worriers.
Funny how that all worked out. Because all of the Chicken Little types who have been concerned about the U.S.'s expansion of warrentless digital surveillance might have been right.
An article published yesterday by Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian makes the claim that leaked documents expose an astounding degree of NSA access to servers of major U.S. tech companies. Access that goes well beyond the various attempts at gathering user data that have been reported in the past.
Greenwald followed up that post with another providing more background information on the NSA and its development over the past decades. Both of those articles might be worth reading.