10 Years After Snowden's First Leak, What Have We Learned? [telecom]

[The Telecom Digest]

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:30PM from the then-and-now dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register:

The world got a first glimpse into the US government's
far-reaching surveillance of American citizens' communications --
namely, their Verizon telephone calls -- 10 years ago this week
when Edward Snowden's initial leaks hit the press. [...] In the
decade since then, "reformers have made real progress advancing
the bipartisan notion that Americans' liberty and security are
not mutually exclusive," [US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)]
said. "That has delivered tangible results: in 2015 Congress
ended bulk collection of Americans' phone records by passing the
USA Freedom Act." This bill sought to end the daily snooping into
American's phone calls by forcing telcos to collect the records
and make the Feds apply for the information.

https://tinyurl.com/4jjy2eue

[Marco Moock]

10 Years After Snowden's First Leak, What Have We Learned?

Most people have learned nothing. They don't save their files on their
own machines, they use services from Google etc.

Many people use Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Tiktok.

They don't care if they are spied out.

[Bill Horne]

Post by Marco Moock

10 Years After Snowden's First Leak, What Have We Learned?

"We" weren't the ones who needed the lesson. Our government learned
that when it hires people whom have a conscience and orders them to
break the law, bad things happen.

Post by Marco Moock
Most people have learned nothing. They don't save their files on their
own machines, they use services from Google etc.
Many people use Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Tiktok.
They don't care if they are spied out.

I think there's a kinder, gentler explanation: most people know that
almost everything they do on their computer while at home is a trivial
pursuit of entertainment, and not worth protecting. I don't keep my
back records in the cloud, nor my tax files, but I keep photos of my
family there, and pictures of our garden, and a blog as well.

The key isn't to care about spying: it's to never put things out in
public that we might be embarrassed to see on a billboard.

Bill