Snowden and the Future
I recently ran across this series of lectures by Eben Moglen - who was part of Phil Zimmerman's Pretty Good Privacy legal defense team against the US govt., and helped write the GPLv3 for the Free Software Foundation.
It's generally interesting if you're particularly concerned or interested about privacy, government spying, how we got here, and where we're going in the wake of Snowden's revelations, but Part III - The Union, May it be Preserved contains some of the clearest and most insightful thinking on the subject of the nature of privacy on the Internet that I've read in a long time. If you're only slightly concerned or interested about privacy, I think it's worth checking out.
we can decompose “privacy,” the concepts that we float around under that word, into three more specific parts: First, secrecy: that is, our ability to have our messages understood only by those to whom we intend to send them. Second, anonymity: that is, our ability to send and receive messages, which may be public in their content, without revealing who said and who listened or read what was said. Third, autonomy: that is, the avoidance of coercion, interference, and intervention by parties who have violated either our secrecy or our anonymity
Strangely, despite generally having no problem with reading long tracts of text on a computer monitor, I preferred watching the videos in this case. Despite Mr. Moglen's eloquence sometimes interfering with his clarity; his slightly irritating habit of turning away from the microphone and tailing off towards the end of a sentence only to turn back towards it and begin another with vigour in a way that makes it feel like he's started SHOUTING; and of course their sheer length, the videos do add a compelling dimension to his treatises.
It's generally interesting if you're particularly concerned or interested about privacy, government spying, how we got here, and where we're going in the wake of Snowden's revelations, but Part III - The Union, May it be Preserved contains some of the clearest and most insightful thinking on the subject of the nature of privacy on the Internet that I've read in a long time. If you're only slightly concerned or interested about privacy, I think it's worth checking out.
we can decompose “privacy,” the concepts that we float around under that word, into three more specific parts: First, secrecy: that is, our ability to have our messages understood only by those to whom we intend to send them. Second, anonymity: that is, our ability to send and receive messages, which may be public in their content, without revealing who said and who listened or read what was said. Third, autonomy: that is, the avoidance of coercion, interference, and intervention by parties who have violated either our secrecy or our anonymity
Strangely, despite generally having no problem with reading long tracts of text on a computer monitor, I preferred watching the videos in this case. Despite Mr. Moglen's eloquence sometimes interfering with his clarity; his slightly irritating habit of turning away from the microphone and tailing off towards the end of a sentence only to turn back towards it and begin another with vigour in a way that makes it feel like he's started SHOUTING; and of course their sheer length, the videos do add a compelling dimension to his treatises.