We’ve been discussing cyberstalking and the abuse of private information on the web at an individual level. (hint: You want private? Don’t put it on the web!) But there’s more to it than unguarded Facebook comments and anonymous trolling.
I remember I first made Jacqueline’s acquaintance here at The Paepae after I commented on the Herald on Sunday — staffed by ‘pond scum’ & ‘reprobates’ as broadcaster Mike Hosking calls them 🙂 — gloating er, sorry, explaining how they tracked Jackie to her home, to photograph her opening her front door from the street when a reporter knocked at it … via Facebook, they said — a contention she still insists is implausible, BTW.
Those actions struck me then, and strike me now as an unjustified invasion of her privacy. (See my post: ‘Facebook leaks like a sieve (Part 2)‘ and comments stream re David Fisher’s assurances.)
But here’s an interesting article which takes a different, more serious approach to cyber-security and information privacy — protecting yourself from perfectly legal gummint snooping!
5 Essential Privacy Tools For The Next Crypto War
by Jon Matonis Forbes magazine
Read it at Forbes if you want to find out what you can do to protect your ‘email privacy‘ (“[these] products, when used correctly, offer subpoena-proof email communication”) or how to encrypt your data for ‘file privacy‘ as well as ‘voice privacy‘, ‘chat privacy‘ and ‘traffic privacy‘.
“subpoena-proof” is an interesting description of a standard, dontcha think?
I don’t do any of these, in the (possibly mistaken) belief that I’m an innocent civilian without any real secrets to protect, since I left MI5 (joke). Gee. Do you think I’ll be OK? (I guess Matt Blomfield will be wishing the trove of emails and other data that found its way to Cameron Slater had been encrypted.)
What do you think?
– P
There’s no such thing as an innocent civilian!
I say that in all seriousness, because, people’s politics and even race have gotten them killed in the past.
But in saying that, you can’t live in fear, and I certainly don’t, even though my father’s family were transported to Siberia in WWII because they were “enemies of communism”.
I just worry about the lone nutters as opposed to the government going mad. If the government is going to go mad and start rounding people up based on their political opinions, they won’t have any trouble figuring out who I am.
🙂
Yes, good points.
If the ‘security agencies’ wanted to construct a case to take someone out of circulation they could just *manufacture* a case … they don’t need our data to do that.
Spies have been forging documents (or ‘bearing false witness’, to put it another way) for hundreds of years, after all.
Look at the treatment of Anwar Ibrahim, or Julian Assange.
– P