Online spying and surveillance have a chilling effect on free speech. They create an environment in which we refrain from posting on Facebook, conducting Web searches, sending emails, writing blog posts or otherwise communicating online for fear that the National Security Agency could come knocking.
Tell your senators to vote "NO" on any cybersecurity bill that threatens our online privacy.
Watching conventional wisdom form in Washington can be appalling. The emerging consensus on surveillance this past week has D.C.’s pundit class saying that privacy violations are a small price to pay for keeping Americans safe.
But conventional wisdom is wrong.
You don’t know what I do on the Internet. Because I am really good at privacy.
I have expertly set my Facebook settings. People come to me for advice on these matters. Strangers cannot mess with me.
The recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs came as a shock for much of the nation. But here’s the thing about my so-called “millennial” generation: We’ve known all along that we’re being watched.
Whether you think spying is OK or not depends on your relationship to the information being collected.
If you’re on the gathering end, the invasion of someone else’s privacy doesn’t seem like a big deal. But if you’re the one whose private life is being pried into, this kind of surveillance seems like a very big deal indeed.
The government is spying on you. In fact, the National Security Agency may be reading this very blog post. So the Free Press Action Fund has teamed up with Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future and other groups to launch StopWatching.Us — a call for Congress to investigate the NSA’s privacy-killing surveillance schemes.
WASHINGTON — Since 2007, the federal government has been working with the nation's top Internet companies — a group that reportedly includes Apple, Facebook and Google — to access their users' electronic communications. Under the surveillance program, known as PRISM, the National Security Agency collects foreign communications traffic from these companies. It's likely that PRISM also sweeps in Americans' domestic electronic communications.
This is big. And positively frightening.
The Obama administration is spying on all calls millions of Verizon customers make each day to any phone number inside or outside the United States.
In 1992, consumers were giving Congress an earful about their cable bills. A decade of deregulation meant cable subscribers had to fend for themselves in a monopoly market where cable TV companies abused their pricing power.
