Speaking of spying on us...

Several articles worth checking out. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

From Boing Boing

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" - not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans. This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies.

Also from Boing Boing
(Click on the link to follow to the PBS video)

Spying On The Home Front: A 2007 PBS FRONTLINE worth revisiting
Given the recent news about the NSA's domestic surveillance programs, this PBS FRONTLINE documentary hour from 2007 is worth revisiting: "Spying On The Home Front. In the report, Former CIA Assistant General Counsel Suzanne Spaulding tells correspondent Hedrick Smith, "So many people in America think this does not affect them. They've been convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists. I think that's wrong. Our programs are not perfect, and it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs." 

From Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing

Why you should care about surveillance

I got tired of people savvying me about the revelations of NSA surveillance and asking why anyone would care about secret, intrusive spying, so I wrote a new Guardian column about it, "The NSA's Prism: why we should care."

    We're bad at privacy because the consequences of privacy disclosures are separated by a lot of time and space from the disclosures themselves. It's like trying to get good at cricket by swinging the bat, closing your eyes before you see where the ball is headed, and then being told, months later, somewhere else, where the ball went. So of course we're bad at privacy: almost all our privacy disclosures do no harm, and some of them cause grotesque harm, but when this happens, it happens so far away from the disclosure that we can't learn from it.

    You should care about privacy because privacy isn't secrecy. I know what you do in the toilet, but that doesn't mean you don't want to close the door when you go in the stall.

    You should care about privacy because if the data says you've done something wrong, then the person reading the data will interpret everything else you do through that light. Naked Citizens, a short, free documentary, documents several horrifying cases of police being told by computers that someone might be up to something suspicious, and thereafter interpreting everything they learn about that suspect as evidence of wrongdoing. For example, when a computer programmer named David Mery entered a tube station wearing a jacket in warm weather, an algorithm monitoring the CCTV brought him to the attention of a human operator as someone suspicious. When Mery let a train go by without boarding, the operator decided it was alarming behaviour. The police arrested him, searched him, asked him to explain every scrap of paper in his flat. A doodle consisting of random scribbles was characterised as a map of the tube station. Though he was never convicted of a crime, Mery is still on file as a potential terrorist eight years later, and can't get a visa to travel abroad. Once a computer ascribes suspiciousness to someone, everything else in that person's life becomes sinister and inexplicable.