The Internet As We Know It
Is On Its' Deathbed
Snowden's leaks show how the Internet can be turned against us.
July 30, 2013
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| Absolute Zero |
The original vision of the Internet, where information and media is
freely shared, without one’s computer strokes and searches being
metered, tracked, traced, archived, dissected, marketed and warehoused
in government data banks, is dead. And that’s what’s being lost by
mainstream media in the ongoing Edward Snowden coverage.
The Snowden story is not about whether Snowden is a spy, or U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder will seek the death penalty, or whether
Russian President Vladamir Putin will let him stay, or what dark novels
his Russian lawyer has given him, or what clean clothes he has. It is,
as the U.K. Guardian
notes, what Snowden has revealed about today’s Internet.
Snowden’s revelations are the end of a vision of unfettered Internet
freedom. Over the past decade, we’ve heard all kinds of pronoucements
that the Internet is in its death throes. Technically speaking, the net
is bigger, more alive and more people are interconnected than ever. But
what has died amid the Internet’s evolution?
In 2002, Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy,
wrote that
big telecom companies were going to kill the net by charging for data
use, like a utility charges for the water piped into one’s home. Gamers
were particularly upset about that scenario. Today’s bigger and faster
data pipes seem to have offset the fear of restricted access. But
today’s Internet users pay just as Chester predicted.
Last year’s
SOPA fights raised another Internet deathbed scenario: the prospect that there might be government
censorship of
content, because industries built on creating content could not stop
its theft and demanded that Congress protect the intellectual property.
The fight became so rancorous it killed congressional action. The
Internet didn’t die, of course, but kept growing, with big technology
firms increasingly capturing humanity’s keystrokes for their own
marketing purposes.
A decade ago, few people forecast that the net’s growth would mean
the disintegration of privacy for just about everyone who uses computers
and digital devices. But that’s what’s at the heart of Snowden’s
disclosures. And it’s not just a loss of personal privacy to the
corporate sector—Google, Facebook, AT&T and the like—but its loss to
the federal government’s spy agencies, police and secret courts.
“Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story,”
wrote the U.K.
Guardian’s John Naughton last weekend. “The story is what he has
revealed about our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped
most of the world’s mainstream media.”
Snowden told Americans and the world that their governments—so-called
democracies whose legacies in the 20th century include defeating
fascism and expanding individual civil rights against state power—were
spying on them. It’s not the same as the Soviets in the Cold War. It’s
slicker and smarter: just collect and siphon and sort our data trails
and digital fingerprints for later scrutiny. Every call, e-mail, search
and move is fair game.
A lot of people have responded to Snowden’s revelations with a shrug,
saying, “I have nothing to hide.” But that misses the point. It’s bad
enough that private companies track our movements, tastes, habits,
health and networks, all to sell us more stuff. But when governments do
the same thing, creating a domestic spying
industry with hundreds of thousands of contractors, the potential for abuse is frightening.
That digital dragnet is what Snowden has been trying to bring into
the open and reform: the Internet, once one of our greatest tools, can
be turned against us.
History has shown that he is correct. The 20th century’s targets of
totalitarian states had almost nowhere to run. The enemies of Egypt’s
military coup, like them or not, are not so secretly being rounded up
and arrested. And Snowden, the messenger in a global Internet-based
spying scandal, is now a man without a country.
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To add to the article above it is imperative that an individual's privacy be preserved. Problems with the loss of personal liberty and religious persecution are what drove the first settlers to America. Now, in America the two powerful religions, Christian and Catholic, are determined to dominate all the fringe worshipers and bring them into their fold. Just think of the pressure they could bear if the fringe or miscellaneous worshipers had no privacy to practice alternative forms of belief! Practices like meditation, natural healing, spirit awareness, Chakra clearing and stimulation, and other less accepted beliefs could be categorized as blasphemy or illegal and the same prejudice that causes race riots could suppress our freedom of religion.
Sometimes Flitter gets criticised for mentioning politics at church. Unfortunately church is so closely regulated by the tide of politic correctness that due diligence must always be observed. I predict that in the future Spirit is moving to a free and open method of worship that includes contributions by every member in a Spirit community. Eventually this type of beneficial worship will overcome the rich and powerful standing major religions -- if they don't incorporate truth and freedom and acceptance into their tenants. The only thing holding the major religions together now is the vast earthly resources they have accumulated.
By letting go of earthly riches and embracing the never-ending abundance of plenty that flows from Spirit through man a truthful and wise sacred bond will form.
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Spirituality
is not to be learned
by flight from the world.
by running away from things.
or by turning solitary and going apart from the world,
Rather,
we must learn an inner solitude
wherever or with whomever we may be.
We must learn to penetrate things
and find God there.
Meister Eckhart
Meditations
"The path is beautiful and pleasant and joyful and familiar
by Matthew Fox
