Monday, January 5, 2015

Cyber war

I have finally gotten around to reading Julian Assange's book about the treasure trove of information released by Edward Snowden, a high-level techie in the United States National Security establishment.

It's scary because he makes a solid case that all, and I mean all, telephone calls, e-mails and internet searches in the United States and much of the rest of the world is captured by the U.S. spies.

It's billions - yea, more than a trillion - messages.

Snowdon, who is hiding in an embassy in Moscow, also revealed that the U.S. has well-developed technology to disrupt national internet and telephone systems.

That's what they apparently did recently to North Korea.

Is this not an act of aggressive war?

Snowdon's advice is to say nothing via telephone or e-mail that you don't want the U.S. spies to know. Plus they share their data with the FBI, the CIA and, of course, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service which would be more appropriately named the Canadian Insecurities Intelligence Spy Service.

So, do you really want the government to know who you phone, their phone number, how long you talked, every time you call? Ditto for e-mails and internet searches.

Some ask "what have you got to hide?"

When Stephen Harper publishes this information for himself, maybe I won't be quite so worried. Then again, maybe we all would be more worried than ever.