Paul Jacobson

Tag: nsa

  • Social media has livestock

    I just had to share this quote from Bruce Sterling’s article titled “The Ecuadorian Library or, The Blast Shack After Three Years” – Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock. This is a nice metaphorical companion to the saying that if you arent paying, you are the product (although I’m not entirely…

  • Why "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear" argument is flawed

    Today’s encryption may be easy to break in years to come but that doesn’t mean tomorrow’s encryption won’t be stronger. This idea of “we’ll if you haven’t done anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to hide” is flawed for so many reasons. It assumes we shouldn’t be entitled to a degree of secrecy based on…

  • Privacy isn't dead and it's not about what you have to hide

    One of the responses to revelations of NSA and the UK’s GCHQ surveillance of our data is a throwback to that idea that privacy is dead and we should “get over it” and adapt to a world of almost radical publicity. Coupled with this position is the notion that if you have nothing to hide,…

  • PRISM, Data Driven Marketing and Why Transparency Is Essential

    Revelations about the American surveillance program called PRISM have been astounding, not so much because we have discovered that the US government has been spying on, well, everyone both within the United States and internationally, but because of the sheer scale of the program. This story initially broke on The Guardian when Glenn Greenwald reported…