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On its side, the mug featured a smiling, square-jawed World War II soldier, java in hand. “How about a nice big cup of shut the fuck up?” the GI said. Secrecy culture, circa 1944, never out of style.
Journalists, same as everyone else, had accepted the gifts of the internet without considering their price.
Should we trust not only Blair and Negroponte, not only President Obama, but also every successive heir to the surveillance machine?
“if you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”
A senior government lawyer asked pointedly whether reporters have a professional body to sanction unethical conduct. (We do not. Anyone can commit journalism without a license.)
It’s weird to have opsec when you’re dating.”
urged. Sometimes, as the writer Michael Kinsley has said, the scandal is what’s legal.
And we totally forget that when monsters fight it’s the city that suffers.
No member of Congress ever asked him whether he thought U.S. intelligence went too far, collected too much information, put too much privacy at risk. “The only thing they ever asked was how we failed to anticipate something, how we failed to stop it, why we did not know enough,” he said.
If I switched off my usual phone and turned on a burner at around the same time and place, the NSA could also make that connection and identify the burner phone as mine.
“One of the key components of location data, and why it’s so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don’t let you keep it private,” privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian told me. People who value their privacy can encrypt their emails and disguise their online identities, but “the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.”
“The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,”
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
