Free at last!

Free at last!

You can regard the quote as misplaced, irresponsible, or plain crazy. The author of this post goes with "corny".

If you can muster a little bit of sympathy for a disabused Westerner, that would be nice. The blogger just finished reading the "legal justification" of what looks like the biggest spy program the planet has ever seen, and the conclusion is not very optimistic.

The takeaway is that governments have been able to erode our liberties in often small, even tiny steps and then collate these tiny steps into an overarching narrative of surveillance.

Take the legal precedent of individual phone records. Courts have decided that there is no privacy for these records because you hand them over voluntarily to the phone company.

This, in the opinion of the blogster, is evil. We know that these seemingly small issues will be taken up and extended. Once this happens, the public discussion turns to the validity of the extension, the evil base cannot be questioned any longer unless you are willing to be called naive, or a wingnut, or in some cases an extremist.

If someone pierces the narrative for a moment and, for instance, shuts down an email service like Lavabit, what do we do with this glimpse into an alternative reality?

The blogster went and had a chat with the cats.

It is a coping mechanism which has worked in the past.

After a satisfying chat with the cats, the blogster is usually refreshed and ready to take some more abuse by the government or by some retired general.

The blogster's expectation of privacy does not match reality, and that's okay. Because other desires or expectations quite often  do not match reality. The blogster would love to be better looking, smarter, have more money, be able to tell a certain general in person to f** off -- but needs no action on any of these issues.

Internet privacy measures the blogster has taken for himself pre-date the latest surveillance scare by years. Our browser homepage is the high privacy search engine ixquick, our DNS usually points to OpenNic.

And the TOR relay quietly runs for the rest of the world to use when we are not busy checking the Google AdSense account for the latest income (in cents, not dollars) or regaling ourselves on Twitter.

There are some very, very smart people on Twitter.

One more thing: the latest attack on sites on the TOR network did not come as a surprise to the blogster. As a matter of fact, in an email in late June to a Twitter acquaintance, the blogster mentioned the probability.

We end this post with a tip of the hat to President Carter, the only living president to speak up.

Feel free to disagree strongly!

The beauty of the mess is that we truly are in the same leaky boat, unless you are one of lucky privileged few.