Vienna 9/03/2022
Edward Snowden, born in 1983, a former CIA agent, dedicated 9 years of his life to this intelligence agency as a gifted young computer savvy professional. He participated in the expansion of mass surveillance, including as part of the Pegasus Project – to intercept all information sent over the Internet and cell phones.
After he decided to contact journalists and tell how the governments of many countries, including the United States, break their laws and illegally collect information about their citizens, he became known in the media as a spy, as is usual in such cases and accused of working for the CIA to discredit him in the eyes of those opposed to the surveillance policy.
In Wikipedia you can read: NSA Director Keith Alexander initially estimated that Snowden copied and released between 50,000 and 200,000 NSA documents. In 2013 he was granted political asylum in Russia, where he lives to this day.
Three years ago he published the book Permanent Record in which he describes the truth about mass surveillance and the fact that we have evolved from Internet consumers to Internet commodities.
In the latest video, he describes how secret services use your smartphone to eavesdrop on conversations in apartments, even if the phone appears to be inactive.
While I am aware of Snowden’s information on the subject of the Internet and mobile telephony, as Edward Snowden described in a very layman’s way in his last video above, I will not go into detail about what surveillance is all about. I’m interested in the possibility of using this enormous amount of data that is collected on servers.
Although information about what Mr. Smith ate for breakfast may be of interest to corporations like Nestle, the sheer volume of useless conversations, email content, or whereabouts information the average person receives requires the use of good algorithms that enable fast searches by basic words. Words like “bomb”, “assassination attempt” or “suicide” used to be used, but today “virus”, “fascism” and “Ukraine” probably dominate. If someone ever created a complete historical database of watchwords, there would be no need to teach history to children at school – any passwords will do and everything is clear.
Author of the article: Marek Wojcik