When EB and I first crawled on the Web, circa 1993, the Web was a novelty. No one was making billions of dollars on the Web. There were no Facebooks or Googles or Twitters. Our most fun thing to do was visit Dave Central (a freeware site), and try all the new freeware he listed each day. Email was not sophisticated but it got the job done. There were viruses then, but no tricky malware, browser toolbars, hijackers, money-stealing Trojans, etc. The Web was fun and we both couldn’t wait until our old dial-up modems connected us to the Web. We can still remember the wait, and the squawking sound sand the sound when the connection was made by those old phone modems.
What happened to the beloved Web of the early and mid 1990’s. In one word: Money. Money drives the world and money drives the Internet. And where the money is so goes the power — and the criminals. If a huge solar flare, as big as the one that struck the Earth’s atmophere in the 1800’s were to strike today:
1. You couldn’t shop for groceries
2. You couldn’t do your banking
3. You couldn’t buy fuel
4. You’d have no electricity
5. You’d have no water (unless you have a well or a lot of bottled water)
6. The stock market would close
7. Many people would die
Money drove the Internet and now the Internet drives the money and the world. It’s become the one relentlessly turning ultimately important cog that controls almost every aspect of our lives. And while 3 billion people have access to the Internet, 4 billion still don’t — so the Internet will keep growing and growing and become even more inextricably linked to our every day lives.
Because we’ve all been so trusting and so willing to spy on ourselves (see Facebook and Twitter, for example), it’s no wonder that the NSA sees the Internet as a fecund field full of amber waves of personal human information rippling in the cyber wind –all ripe and ready for harvesting. And whether or not that information is in any way related to our national security, and whether or not we’re really any safer, the fact remains that humans run the NSA, and humans are all fallible creatures. There’s some juicy stuff going on between folks — and those people at the NSA can glean anything they want from anyone they want, any time they want — because we all let it happen. We created the monsters which now threaten to swallow us up — and we can’t survive without the monsters we created.
The details of NSA’s intrusions into the private lives of U.S. citizens just keeps on coming, and with every new leak, we have to wonder — just how deep does this go? Are the giants of the Internet, like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Fascebook, Twitter and others, in cahoots with the government — are they all partners of some dirty cartel gleaning our personal information because they can, or because it’s really necessary? We will never know — but as many have pointed out, all this information gathering didn’t stop the Marathon bombers. Had it been a more sophisticated plan, using chemical or biological or nuclear devices, tens of thousands might have been killed, and many more tens of thousands of lives affected. Has the NSA gone too far? What terrorist with intelligence would dare use a cell phone or a computer to plan a deadly attack?
So that’s food for thought .
Here’s a story you’ll find interesting. Well, at least we found it interesting: we hope you will too.
“iPhone Users Are ‘Zombies’ And Steve Jobs Was ‘Big Brother,’ According To The NSA: Report
In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, the NSA reportedly called Apple co-founder Steve Jobs “Big Brother,” while also describing iPhone users as “zombies.”
In documents leaked by the German news magazine Der Spiegel on Sunday, the National Security Agency suggests that Apple and Steve Jobs are controlling and observing the public.
In fact, the NSA has been spying on Americans’ email data and phone data for years. In its story Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA accesses data from all major types of smartphones. The NSA also seems to have access to iPhone geolocation tools and other data, Der Spiegel reports.
Der Spiegel obtained slides from what looks to be an internal NSA presentation. One of the slides obtained by Der Spiegel actually uses images from Apple’s “1984” commercial, which played during the 1984 Super Bowl. The whole purpose of that commercial, of course, was to show how Apple would help people avoid an oppressive society, not to start an oppressive society.
‘Who knew in 1984… that this would be big brother… and the zombies would be paying customers?” the slides ask. On the slide referring to “Big Brother,” there’s a photo of Steve Jobs, and on the slide about zombies there’s photos of over-excited Apple fans with their new iPhones. You can see the slides below: …'”