Once again, much as I hate sounding like a bong-watered granola shaver, the Dead Kennedys had this nailed in the Reagan years. After all, think about it: where are you going to go for mobile phone privacy or computer privacy when Microsoft, Google and Apple are all mobbed up with the NSA? You’ll need something based on Linux and I don’t mean Android, but even if you can get that securely – Verizon and AT&T and Sprint are mobbed up with the NSA and there’s no reason to think T-Mobile isn’t, and even if you don’t roll with them, every MVNO is backboned off one of them, so what good does it do you?
And even if you go to all those lengths – you have your Ubuntu laptop and your Ubuntu-based phone and you’re on some carrier that miraculously isn’t giving the NSA anything, and don’t say you’re using Skype over Wi-Fi or FaceTime or Google Hangouts – once you’ve done all that to secure yourself, ask: what about the party at the other end? Because unless they’re doing all the same stuff, you may as well not bother once the other half of the conversation is wide open.
Let’s face it: cypherpunks and BitCoin enthusiasts and the truly paranoid are all over this already, but Ed Earl Brown isn’t really stuck into this particular issue. Mostly because even if he cared, Ed Earl Brown isn’t in a position to actually do anything about it. Even if he could shop around for a broadband provider who won’t sell you down the river, can you trust them? (Could have trusted Speakeasy back in the day, but they got eated.) Wireless company? I mean sure there’s Working Assets or whatever they’re called now, but unless something has changed, their MVNO backbone is Sprint.
That ship has sailed, that horse is out of the barn, that genie is out of the bottle, that metaphor is befucked, people. The time to nip this in the bud was in 2006 or so. Instead we find ourselves in the position implied by Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: technology has run out ahead of law and culture and the fix will have to be legal and cultural. We cannot technologically prevent this kind of snooping and data aggregation, especially when Google and Facebook have it at the heart of their business model – all we can do is make the improper accessing and misuse of that data legally, morally and culturally unacceptable. Which, in light of current levels of huffing and puffing online, we might actually be able to do something about. Maybe. But forget about un-ringing that bell right now. In a world where people not only walk around with a personal GPS locator in their pocket but feed their location into Foursquare and their friendships into Facebook and a steady diet of their surroundings into Instagram, we’ve already proven that we’re too fond of the toothpaste to put it back in the tube.