The message is clear. People do NOT want the U.S. government to have access to their data. Since 2001, the United States of America has been lowering standards for privacy and human rights throughout the world. But, they are only beginning. As Uncle Carl Levin points out, FATCA should be used to provide information to all (including even the IRS) U.S. government agencies. This post strings together “tweets” that reference articles in the last week! Wasn’t there a great war fought to preserve our freedoms? Imagine somebody going to sleep in 1940. Imagine that person awakening today. He would think that the Allied Powers were the losers in World War 2.
There’s good news and bad news
The good news is the the U.S. is busy creating new industries.
The bad news is that the U.S. has created the need for these industries.
It’s about the protection of data privacy stupid!
In a world where “Data is Gold” people do NOT want “Form Nation” to access their Data. As the following article makes clear:
NSA spying of Internet traffic sparks race to create #offshore havens for data privacy http://t.co/GRhU4tS73a via @WSJ – #FATCA 4 data!
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) October 4, 2013
Three of Germany’s largest email providers, including partly state-owned Deutsche Telekom AG, DTE.XE +0.56% teamed up to offer a new service, Email Made in Germany. The companies promise that by encrypting email through German servers and hewing to the country’s strict privacy laws, U.S. authorities won’t easily be able to pry inside. More than a hundred thousand Germans have flocked to the service since it was rolled out in August.
“We can say that we protect the email inbox according to German law,” says Jorg Fries-Lammers, a spokesman for one of the German companies, 1&1 Internet AG. “It’s definitely a unique selling point.”
As proof of how serious the U.S. government is in its efforts to eradicate data privacy:
Senators Push to Preserve N.S.A. Phone Surveillance http://t.co/BrvhnvPMHR – Of course, phone surveillance is part of general surveillance
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) October 4, 2013
and
NSA Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens http://t.co/4BDfzoUejo – In Canada "gov has no business in the bedrooms of nation"
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) October 4, 2013
It’s enough to make you want to avoid using the phone:
In Test Project, N.S.A. Tracked Cellphone Locations http://t.co/3BJGhwjIYA – Probably to find them more easily in the event of illness.
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) October 4, 2013
And, if they can’t get what they want by stealth, there is the “Midnight Knock On The Door”. Fortunately, some people won’t let them in!
As FBI Pursued #EdwardSnowden, an E-Mail Service Stood Firm http://t.co/ZLs9iNlqRv – “Udon’t need to bug an entire city 2 bug one guy"
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) October 4, 2013
Article includes:
DALLAS — One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find an F.B.I. agent’s business card on his Dallas doorstep. So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end with Mr. Levison’s shutting the business he had spent a decade building and becoming an unlikely hero of privacy advocates in their escalating battle with the government over Internet security.
Prosecutors, it turned out, were pursuing a notable user of Lavabit, Mr. Levison’s secure e-mail service: Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents that have put the intelligence agency under sharp scrutiny. Mr. Levison was willing to allow investigators with a court order to tap Mr. Snowden’s e-mail account; he had complied with similar narrowly targeted requests involving other customers about two dozen times.
But they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much.
“You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,” Mr. Levison, 32, said in a recent interview. “In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection.”
On Aug. 8, Mr. Levison closed Lavabit rather than, in his view, betray his promise of secure e-mail to his customers. The move, which he explained in a letter on his Web site, drew fervent support from civil libertarians but was seen by prosecutors as an act of defiance that fell just short of a crime.
Perhaps Mr. Livison should, along with Edward Snowden, be nominated for a Human Rights award!
I read about this yesterday on Slashdot. A way to share data that allows people to P2P sans any way of being detected. Pretty interesting and catching on. It’s called Dead Drops.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/02/1857240/dead-drops-p2p-file-sharing-spreads-around-globe?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
All Things Considered is doing a few stories on DATA collection that might interest you… Here is the last in their 4 part series…
Your Digital Trail: Data Fuels Political And Legal Agendas
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/03/228199021/your-digital-trail-data-fuels-political-and-legal-agendas
I meant DATA. I have DATCA on my brain! 🙂
As one who worked for NSA while exclusively posted outside the United States a few years ago. I can assure you that choosing an email service outside the US no matter it’s level of security or encryption. The NSA will read your stuff like it was front page news if they care to. They collect everything and sift everything with the most powerful systems in the world. Your only defense is to be beneath notice, and to never use any of the key words, phrases or apparent code talk.
The level of spying is completely off the charts, you were living in 1984(The Novel) prior to (the year) 1984. It’s already too late to get concerned the deed was done while the public was asleep. Now days people are only just beginning to realize that they have been herded into a prison and there is no privacy, big brother is in full control. I personally don’t think there is any solution to situation now it’s already too late.
For these and many other reasons related to the loss of freedom in the US I relinquished my citizenship a few years ago.
ExUSA, are you sure the NSA isn’t going to come after you?
The Stasi, 1984, Goebbels machine, and Everything in history is culminating. Yesterday, they got some nutso to crash her car around in the Capitol area. Today, most of the country is demanding better access to confidential mental records, ie, every mental Health and physical Health record will be gone through to make sure that criminals can be caught prior to knowing they are criminals.
Remember all those things they taught you about East Germany in middle school? Remember everything about getting the people to want to be controlled? THe use of religious differences? Making up names of terrorist groups for the people to latch onto? HEre it is.
it is not just the service provider but every internet node the message packets travel through that the information can be intercepted. Given enough time and processing power the NSA can probably break any encryption.
Maybe all this electronic spying will revive snail mail and the use typewriters as the Indian government has done.
Homelanders base laws like FATCA on the US is the only ‘greatest country of the world’ club and rest of the world can’t do without. Speak to European tourists hitting US streets, they may not agree.
Carl Levin lives in a bygone era of 1960s America when it was on top of its game. Fast forward 2013 this is no longer true. Excessive homelessness, crumbling infrastructure, and European tourists who see the US as the ‘cheap’ destination because the Euro has appreciated from .85US to $1.36US that’s a 60% appreciation. Currency go up and down but it’s hard to dispute the greenback has taken a hit.
Levin believes the G20 world is absolutely dying to get to the US to escape the poverty and injustices of their own countries. Carl you should get out more.
I have been reading many articles about this lately starting with Greenwald’s first articles and even before that. I’ve got to say this is one of the most disheartening issues of our time. It’s so distressing. We thought McCarthy was bad? I used to wonder how people felt in places like China years ago. What was it like to be watched all the time? Well, now we know.
Levin, ug! I sat and watched him gift Michigan’s votes once long ago to someone who did not earn them and haven’t been able to abide him or his slight of hand tactics since.
What is so startling about this spying is that people don’t seem to realize how easily abused it is! Want to protest something your government is doing? Get spied on. Want to speak out against something and the government doesn’t like what you have to say? Well, they will sift through everything and find something to shut you up. People must not give in to this. And all this time the U.S. has been on and on about “Freedom” while critical of China’s spying on private citizens.
ExUSA,
And here we are, US Persons who have chosen to live abroad — how many of our collective total is asleep on FATCA (until it may be too late)?
Why isn’t there a mass outcry on our collective part and on the part of the countries we chose to live in?
Why is journalism now mainly just sound bytes, the relaying of short pieces that do not tell full stories and opposing points of view, many ‘cut and pastes’ from press releases sent to them and meet the test of reflecting their own ‘big business’ corporate philosophy?
If all of us, say in Canada, were awake — Canada could still be a leader and make the great difference for the rest of the world in saying “NO” to FATCA. I will never bend to the US telling me that “collateral damage” is necessary and thus acceptable in the cause of finding US tax evaders — as far as I can see, mostly resident in the USA. I don’t want my country, Canada, to say that is acceptable.
EXUSA: Thank you for your post. I have/am actively moving off US servers and also to layers of security in my email accounts. While I have no doubt that the NSA can, if it targets me for some unknown reason, break the encryption/read my mails, my issue is not the NSA as much as the Patriot Act and other legislation that requires ISPs, telcos and email providers like iCloud, et al to turn over customer data based on National Security Letters and other warrantless requests. To avoid these types of US legal processess is reasonably more practical (i.e. move to encryption and to non US servers) than to try to avoid NSA surveillance. Of course, the country where the server is based may not be any better than the US in terms of privacy (but some are).