Google and Facebook may be our best defenders against Big Brother

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/10/google-and-facebook-may-be-our-best-defenders-against-big-brother/



Google and Facebook may be our best defenders against Big Brother
By Jemima Kiss, The Guardian
Sunday, November 10, 2013 9:18 EST

Over a few weeks’ worth of bedtimes in the summer of 1984, my dad read me Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Though the dystopian context would have been lost on nine-year old me, the pervasive malevolence and the futility of the struggle was not.

References to Orwell are never far off today, whether to Big Brother and the surveillance society, or doublethink and Room 101. The Orwellian dystopia is so familiar now to us – and so astonishingly real – that we might need a new cultural reference, a new literary vision to warn of what lies ahead.

It’s the relentless creep of progress and development that inevitably makes our worst nightmares and most brilliant visions a reality. Fifty years ago, security expert Eugene Kaspersky told a conference last week, the public would have been protesting on the streets at the idea that cameras would be surveilling every public placeacross the country, all day, every day. Today, we just accept it.

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The crisis is in public trust of both our governments – who, when it suits them, will seize the opportunity to criticise oppressive regimes who restrict free speech — and corporations whose reputation depends on credibility and trust. European nations have generally set up rigorous laws to protect their citizens from business, while its governments rely on the trust and goodwill of the public. In the US that situation is reversed, with citizens protected from government through the constitution, and business commercially dependent on trust, among other things. The lack of oversight and accountability has meant the security services never had to draw the line about what is acceptable, necessary, moral and legal.



unhappycamper comment: It is a scary thought that Google and Facebook may be our best bet against NSA spying. Too bad "We The People" haven't been in the discussion loop.