The only thing that shocks me is that any of this is news
Exactly the same sentiment here. How is this news? Like the Prism program... Or the Wikileaks "shocking discoveries"....
Or tapping all the telegraph lines, In 1864.
Operation Five Eyes, since the 1940's
Ever wonder why the NSA decided to farm out their semiconductor manufacture instead of doing it in-house? They own that shit.
They have gone far far away from my wildest nightmares. They have corrupted it absolutely. When they started jailing zimmerman, they got a NO to their sick chip, but they have continued doing it more than ever jumping over not some but all the rules around. Some time ago when the internet started you could not even place an ad on a webpage or internet users would get angry and attack you because people were passionate about the new "nation" that internet was. It was another world. A new world. Slowly, slowly they have converted the library of humankind, the biggest discovery of humankind in the most sick spying shit never invented. We thought it was another type of world but law after law, lobby after lobby they just won.
I am not the only computer specialist shocked, there are many famous techies out there absolutely shocked about what they have done with the computer industry. Thousands of highly skilled technicians have designed, created and recommended the cloud. Thousands of security experts have been working for years to make cryptography the most secure possible. Were they idiots, evil or they just could not fathom the hidden nature of NSA like the rest of the world. Maybe they should have talked with you.
When they were approached by them, most just rejected to follow and they have been persuaded. In the computer industry there has been a lot of passion, starting by innocent people, with a lot of lack of knowledge of the true nature of our masters. A 20 year old cannot even comprehend the vomit that is inside the brain of the oligarchy. Something really beautiful was being created. People had confidence in yahoo, in google, in wikipedia, lately the cloud was also the place to go and there was (there is still) a movement to reduce costs moving to "the cloud" (recommended by many computer experts). Nobody thought they were that far. We knew that britain and Us were friends but not that they were spying on each other just to avoid the laws of their respective countries, their allies. That they would just avoid the health privacy, the banking privacy, their own constitutions, just to sell the information to the better buyer.
Now even if you use something as innocent wikipedia they have converted it into something awful because they know what you are researching and when...
The nature of the computer industry and the net has not been just bad, it has allowed a level of communication and of knowledge that we did not have before. We were condemned to traditional media. Now you have hundreds of alternate media in web pages, youtube and many others that allow people to communicate and know the true nature of the beast. We were not talking in the other case.
Do we? Or does the guardian hold anything much worse?
You knew everything from the beginning in all its depth 3 years ago in all its dimensions like we know now? Good for you.