This is a daily opinion column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder of How-To Geek, featuring his take on the latest in the world of technology.
It’s been a couple of years since Snowden leaked the entire treasure trove of documents to the media and stories started coming out explaining just how much the NSA is spying on us. And nothing has fundamentally changed since then. Nor will it.
NSA dodges another lawsuit because nobody can prove agency is spying on them
Plaintiffs are having trouble taking down the NSA in court for a simple reason: they can’t prove that the spy agency’s wide-reaching surveillance programs actually targeted them. Judges in several courts — including the Supreme Court — have repeatedly ruled that it is not enough to assume that these programs were highly likely to have caught a certain organization’s data in its dragnet.
The latest case to fall victim to this line of reasoning is a case brought forward by the ACLU, Wikimedia, The Nation, Amnesty International, and a few other organizations. In a court’s ruling, US District Judge TS Ellis III writes that the “plaintiffs’ argument is unpersuasive, as the statistical analysis on which the argument rests is incomplete and riddled with assumptions.” He continues on to note that, without the proper context, it’s unclear whether or not Wikipedia is large enough to have come under the NSA’s policies — despite the fact that it’s one of the largest sites on the internet.
Ever since we found out just how much government spying is going on, the security community has been systematically looking into every piece of technology that we use, from operating systems to network protocols, and we’ve learned just how insecure everything is.
Every week or so there’s a new and massive security hole in the technology that runs the internet, and companies and open source programmers alike are patching holes like crazy. Companies are starting to encrypt all of their traffic — Google is even starting to encrypt traffic on their own private network. Apple has made iPhones encrypted by default if you enable a passcode, and Google and even Microsoft have options to fully encrypt your devices. At the end of the day we’ll end up much more secure, and that’s better for all of us.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that nothing has fundamentally changed as far as the spying is concerned, despite all of the stories and media attention online. Organizations like the ACLU have tried, and failed, to even bring cases to figure out what’s actually going on. Very few politicians even talk about it, and the ones that do have no power to change anything. People not only haven’t exploded in anger, they don’t even know the details, as John Oliver illustrated brilliantly in his interview with Snowden.
Everybody knows the government is probably spying on everything, and nobody really cares.
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