<story><title>NSA targets the privacy-conscious</title><url>http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/NSA-targets-the-privacy-conscious,nsa230.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>caster_cp</author><text>The only way out of this, as I see it, is making privacy the default. But this require some cooperation and motivation from the big guys at silicon valley.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if Chrome, Firefox, Safari, all of them had, just like the incognito mode, the private mode. Of course, as anonymity also depends on the behavior of the user online, other actions are needed to really ensure security and privacy. But making it the default will educate more people about the importance of privacy and, more importantly, make the point that privacy isn&amp;#x27;t only for criminals, terrorists and wrong-doers, but that &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot;, law abiding citizens also should have the right to be private. And that is paramount for a democracy to work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yry4345</author><text>I think the cooperation necessary would be for the &amp;quot;big guys&amp;quot; to not have a vested interest in selling out privacy, which has been the prevailing business model for a long time. And, since the big guys only listen to their bottom line, that means not using them until they support privacy. It may mean not using the Internet substantially at all. (It&amp;#x27;s more than a little ironic to be saying this on the preeminent &amp;quot;business hacker&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;startup&amp;quot;) community, which has a visible subset who sympathize with some of the NSA&amp;#x27;s programs, or at least have been able to rationalize them...)&lt;p&gt;As you say, the tools have always been there, but no one uses them. That might be because it&amp;#x27;s a chicken-or-egg problem. At the same time, it might be because the people in the positions to develop and promote the tools, even if only for their own use, are being prevented by a one-track culture that encourages them to sell out their client&amp;#x27;s privacy in addition to discouraging them from working on projects like Tor. (Again, the HN forum is an example of that conflict - being a largely business-oriented forum; surveillance technology sells... Even DuckDuckGo, a favorite startup in this community, has filters to protect us.) Rather than peer-to-peer solutions like Gnutella, Gnunet, Tor, and even open wireless, people continue to make websites with JavaScript encryption, despite the proven MITM threat.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think JavaScript and CSS will get us out of this, but if this latest revelation doesn&amp;#x27;t wake people up in the tech community specifically, nothing will, since BoingBoing readership is a large number of them - which to me means that the tech and programmer categories are themselves a primary focus of the surveillance that some highly-respected tech pundits (and HN forum members) have defended and rationalized as only being used for terrorists and perverts. That definition now includes anyone with enough knowledge to build or use strong privacy tools. The definition now includes everyone on this forum.</text></comment>
<story><title>NSA targets the privacy-conscious</title><url>http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/NSA-targets-the-privacy-conscious,nsa230.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>caster_cp</author><text>The only way out of this, as I see it, is making privacy the default. But this require some cooperation and motivation from the big guys at silicon valley.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if Chrome, Firefox, Safari, all of them had, just like the incognito mode, the private mode. Of course, as anonymity also depends on the behavior of the user online, other actions are needed to really ensure security and privacy. But making it the default will educate more people about the importance of privacy and, more importantly, make the point that privacy isn&amp;#x27;t only for criminals, terrorists and wrong-doers, but that &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot;, law abiding citizens also should have the right to be private. And that is paramount for a democracy to work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zigurd</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;But this require some cooperation and motivation from the big guys at silicon valley&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this is key to making strong encryption commonplace. A social graph and real-time communication could be used to make key exchange easy and secure. Open client software is needed to make security verifiable. And the storage and email infrastructure and clients need to make using encryption the default.&lt;p&gt;All the pieces of a &amp;quot;trust nobody&amp;quot; environment are there, and so are the pieces for making it an easy to use default.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully, doing this will be required for American service and technology companies to regain trust.</text></comment>