It doesn’t matter which way the story is spun by internet businesses:
- We didn’t know they could access our data
- They forced us to share
- They told us to deny it
…governments are intercepting private and personal data. They will achieve it in whichever manner they see fit:
Applebaum, a cryptography expert, was yesterday named as an author of an explosive article in Der Spiegel listing the names and details of several NSA exploits. The Germany magazine published NSA documents that boasted of the agency’s ability to use zero-day exploits to spy on communications passing through the switches and routers of the world’s largest networking vendors, Cisco, Juniper Networks and Huawei, among others.
Today, he detailed previously unreported exploits targeting the most popular lines of servers manufactured by Dell and HP, as well as smartphones of Apple and Samsung.
[Source: IT News]
Ultimately none of this matters. Rather than trying to second-guess which pieces of your data might be discovered, just presume that they all could.
Unless your data is transported via irregular and unpopular channels using the strongest cryptography, it is unlikely to be safe.
Most of the time this won’t be an issue – the NSA won’t be interested in your chit chat – so maintain an everyday social profile online. But for anything that could be flagged or misconstrued (and err on the side of caution), try using off-grid forms of communication.
