Surviving Capitalism (Not) : More Cowbells: new NSA leaks reveal extent of spying tactics

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, January 26, 2015

More Cowbells: new NSA leaks reveal extent of spying tactics

Click here to access article via Reflections on a Revolution from Associated Whistleblowing Press.

In the last few years we have been living a critical moment in the history of the Internet. The good old days, in which optimism was widespread among engineers and new technologies were considered a solution to the great problems of humanity, seem to have disappeared. Nowadays, the Internet has become a very lucrative spying machine, and many of those same engineers are fighting to preserve the most basic rights to privacy.

It’s mostly thanks to Edward Snowden and Wikileaks that we have caught a glimpse of the most obscure practices in the world of industrial-level spying, carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) and its allies.

Under the pretense of fighting terrorism, these agencies now have direct access to the servers of the largest internet platforms like Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo....