PRISM: We are fighting the wrong battle.

Published in: Privacy

After a month’s worth of prism related revelations and discussions, something just clicked inside me and I realized that we are fighting the wrong battle by trying to take extraordinary measures in an effort to protect our data.

We are fighting against an all-powerful organization that:

And how are we fighting this all-powerful organization?

By moving our data from cloud infrastructure and web-services to self-hosted server (something I myself advocated many many times). Or by stop using web-services that we think are colluding with NSA or using encryption to protect our data.

This is useless. NSA doesn’t care much for the few of you who know your way around protecting your data. As long as it’s difficult and time-consuming to protect your own data, and inconvenient to stop using the latest social fad app; most people will do nothing to protect themselves from snooping. And that’s the only thing that matters to NSA.

The few of us who are actually taking these extra measures to protect our data, we are not really fighting against all-power NSA, instead, we are hiding from them.

The only way to effectively hide from an all-powerful organization like NSA is to unplug your computer and stop using the internet.

Instead, we should fight against the same system legal system that made their actions legal and legitimizes snooping on your data and storing them indefinitely.

This is not about being a pro-democrat or a pro-republican, even if you think the current government will not abuse its power (heh), there is no guarantee that a future elected president can not.

We can’t win them by hiding, we have to fight back. Or at least support organizations that are fighting back through the legal system like EFF. If you haven’t already, consider donating to EFF.




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