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Snowden, NSA surveillance and privacy.
What I’ve been up to
I’ve done two episodes of Linux Luddites and two episodes of mintCast.
Chat with listener Isaac Carter
We spoke about the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour and its implications for government surveillance and privacy. We meandered all over the place and ultimately felt quite pessimistic by the end of the conversation. Interesting nonetheless I thought and I hope to chat to Isaac again soon.
Feedback
Thanks to Leigh, Jason Connerly and Mr Sterling for getting in touch.
If you want to get in contact, you can email me at JoeRessPodcast at Gmail.
Speak soon.
It was a nice discussion to listen to, though fairly unstructured and meandering. If the Snowden revelations have any effect, it will be through inspring a few new digital rights activists, not through any direct effect on the public discourse. I am fairly technically literate on the subject, and I find it really hard to keep straight what exactly has been revealed. If I ever had time, I’d like to go back over all of the news stories and make notes for myself on what was actually exposed in the documents. Part of the problem is the massive load of technical detail that was exposed through the direct leaking of the documents, but I think part of it also is the eagerness to hype up many of the revelations. For many of them, the behavior of the NSA that was revealed was actually much more restricted than the initial headline revealed.
Thanks for the comment Will. Yeah the discussion kinda happened last minute so there wasn’t any structure and it’s very easy to meander when talking about Snowden. Glad you still found the discussion interesting. I agree that the load of technical detail is quite a bit for one person to go over and really take in the depth of what they have read. Please let me know if you ever do get around to creating the notes you spoke about because I would love to go over them myself. I agree that the magnitude of the revelations make it easy to get caught up in the hype. I for sure got caught up in the hype once I watched the documentary.