Being watched

SPIES LIKE US

Tricky times for all. What with the terrorist attacks last week and potential for more to come, never have we experienced such an unprecedented threat of danger of this kind before. 

During the Second World War, sirens were sounded and many had a choice to evacuate from the blitz bombing of civilians in London. Even the IRA gave bomb threat warnings. The cold war was the closest we've come to being annihilated by our unknown adversaries but with this current terrorist threat in our mists, we can't know when or from whom the next attack will come. 

Surrender Our Rights

It's come up so many times in the news recently and I've broached this topic before. Our right to privacy. Many are concerned about their private information getting in the wrong hands and with the digital age, this information can be easily accessed and kept forever. With CCTV/high definition cameras, we can be monitored wherever we go, secretly watched from the air, with our every movement tracked by our smart phone. Our devices not only give away our location but also have cameras and microphones which can eavesdrop on our most intimate moments too. Face recognition technology and 'buzzword' tracking software that can flag up words used in our communications and utilised to predict our every movement, work out our preferences/patterns and profiled/assessed for later use - not just for marketing but to determine who we are and what we are likely to do in any given situation.

So, what's worse? The threat of danger from unknowns or feeling like you're being spied on all the time? How ironic I thought, that people say 'I have nothing to fear by being watched as I have nothing to hide' - yet we recently underwent a huge investigation with News International into the hacking scandal and infringements on our civil liberties.

How doubly ironic that I am (still) employed by this same organisation and I also feel like I'm being watched by them right now. 

Many of the celebrities being hacked into, voiced their feelings of paranoia and stress caused from being hounded by the press, not knowing how or from where their intimate secrets were being leaked and used against them. Is this what we want? Surely the better solution is to bring communities together. Getting to know our neighbours and between us all, making better efforts to protect and look out for each other, will help protect our community at the same time as retaining our privacy.

Security

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

Living in a digital age, we're using technology much more to better enrich our lives. We are all spending an increasing amount of time using software and equipment that has the power to track our preferences, movements and other private information. The vast majority of us are now carrying a personal computer around in our pocket that has all of this power. Smartphones give us a direct link to the worldwide web, enabling us to easily connect/communicate with the rest of the world. The Internet provides access to a wealth of information - right at our fingertips from our phones. It also gives power to corporations and governments to track/monitor and spy on us. To stop our civil liberties from being eroded away any further, we all need to take measures to ensure our personal information stays private and stop organisations from abusing their power.

I'm half way through watching a documentary called: Inside the Dark Web - which talks about criminal activity and the increased surveillance being put in place by governments to watch it's citizens. It is frightening to know that the British are being monitored by very sophisticated computers at GCHQ and the US government have been tracking pretty much everybody since even before 2001. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, appears in this documentary and discusses the issues facing us all as we naively move towards a future where our whole lives will be tracked through modern technology. 

The battle for defending our civil rights has been underway for some time. Thankfully, there are some clever people out there creating encryption software and Tor networks which aids anonymity through using untraceable currencies like Bitcoin - whereby monetary controls are removed from central banks/government. There are lots of new networks and tools currently being developed and we now have access to free Chrome extensions like Zenmate, which can safely encrypt information. The more people learn about how our information is being sold on, our identities copied, our data tracked for illicit means, the more people want to know about encryption. I'm attending a geeks weekly meet-up on Tuesday, to try and find out more myself and will pass on any new helpful insights.

Defenders of Truth

I'm also reminded of another insightful documentary watched recently about Aaron Swartz, who became the face of the digital revolution a few years ago when he stood up to the U.S. Government's heavy-handed legal policing of copyright on the internet. He got caught-up in a messy cyber-terrorism case that he paid the ultimate price for fighting against. Just like Socrates, Aaron was a deep thinker that only wanted to make the world a better place. He was a purveyor of truth - and died defending it under very suspicious circumstances. 

Thankfully, there are other brave souls willing to stand up for the good of humanity. Whistle blower, Ed Snowdon, would have had some very tough moments - likely restless moments in the middle of the night, having internal discussions with his moral self. He would have used this reasoning time to come to his final conclusion to speak up. He's been very brave standing up for what is right - regretfully placing himself in the direct line of the US intelligence agency and he's now held accountable by the rest of the world too. 

There are troubling times ahead and we need to be thankful that people like Ed Snowdon, Wiliam Binney, Aaron Schwarz & Wiki-leaks founder Julian Assange - are willing to put themselves in the firing line to put the truth out there.