me after watching snowden(2016) yesterday : "Holy shit, government is going to fuck our privacy!!"

me after watching the circle today: "Holy shit big private companies are going to fuck our privacy!!"

My office senior watching me "Holy yeah boss is going to fuck your privacy"

As someone who follows computing history and is also interested in personal privacy, it's surprising to me that anyone expects anyone else to respect their privacy at all. Some other resources you might be interested in:

Cliff Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg is a great story in and of itself, but it also shows that the NSA was actively watching as much electronic traffic as it could right from the beginning.

Steven Levy's book Crypto tells the story of public key encryption and how the NSA tried to prevent public ownership so it could keep reading all the electronic traffic. (It also makes the possibility of government subversion of crypto standards seem less crazy, although verification of such a thing is well beyond my capabilities and is generally denied.)

Jeffrey Rothfeder's book Privacy for Sale is eye-opening to the possibilities of profiling with big data. The book predates a lot of current sophisticated techniques, so it's even scarier than it was originally. It also shows how American government agencies often contribute by selling their data to data collection companies (despite rules intended to prevent government sale of private information). The most recent case of this that I'm aware of is the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles getting caught selling their databases, which made the news this week, I think. They claim it's actually allowed under the privacy rules and is merely a revenue-generation measure. I suspect they'll be proved correct, sadly.

Anyway, that's probably a lot more than you expected in response to your joke/lament, but it's stuff I've had in my head for a while and you gave me the excuse to share (especially after the news this week that I mentioned earlier).

Side note: I just looked more closely at my copy of The Cuckoo's Egg, and Cliff Still signed it and used it as a prize for something called "the internet hunt." I bought my copy used, so I'll probably never learn the story behind it, but he's a really cool guy, so it's nice to have something that makes the book more special, even if I wasn't the originally intended recipient.

@powerfulparadox thank you for the book suggestions!

Private VPN on your company computer(s). Too difficult?

@impressthenet do you even snowden?