Opinion: Freedom of Speech, Government Espionage and Whistleblowing

There is indeed a growing library about Wikileaks, as a quick search on google/Amazon will tell you (which, you all know, mines your shopping data and patterns to recommend books and other products to you) http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Library-WikiLeaks-Books/lm/R1633HKPBAQHPP. I digress.

Back to the point of this post: following close in the heels of Aaron Swartz who freed research that should have been made readily available in the first place is a former sub-contractor to the NSA, Edward Snowdon, who has been revealed as the source who leaked the fact that the government has been engaging in direct data-collection of its people for reasons that only the latter knows. Both are ‘hackers’ of sorts though of a different kind. We all know that Julian Assange was one too, all those years ago. In case you have not read my post on this, now is the time

Of course, we should know by now that we are all open books: many have social media profiles, bank accounts, and have subscribe to various commercial enterprises. How do you think we can spam mails and spam calls: from companies who have been given the right, by law, to sell whatever data that have been collected of us. In fact, in the US, one has to OPT out from having one’s data being circulated, and even then, the OPTING OUT has a limited timeframe, whereby you would then have to renew, otherwise, you are once again an open source of profit for the commercial sharks. Those of you who post mushy, cheesy statuses alike, and baby photos, will see all the data you have shared, mined for profit or security. Even TV shows have jumped into the bandwagon of having detectives going into the online profile of their victims to find out who their connections are. And, who is to say, that the governments can’t tap into your most private moments? They can call on a tech company that hosts your data to reveal information about you, or to upload all the content you have hosted with them, pretty immediately. One might say that this is the age of post 9/11, but really, this has been happening since when people were still using those old black dial phones (though, obviously, it was a lot harder then since they have to actually go through filing cabinets and those cardboard boxes you see a lot at the archives).