Ted Talks Greenwald on Internet Privacy

¶ … Glenn Greenwald notes in his TED Talk on why privacy matters, the Internet is a great tool both for sharing and for spying and surveillance. Greenwald makes an important point about not viewing the world as made up of good people and bad people (as though only bad people have a reason to want privacy -- so that they can hide what they are doing from those who want to protect the world, aka the government). In reality, the government is responsible for terrorism by arming, training and funding "moderate rebels" and promoting extremist ideologies in the Middle East. It is a pure 1984 play -- an Orwellian nightmare come to life. Those who have no problem with government surveillance are essentially saying that "I have agreed to make myself such a harmless, unthreatening, uninteresting person" that no government will have any reason to look at them. By what if government is not the force for good that people think it is? Greenwald's journalistic work has gone a long way to uncover the reality about our Western leaders and what they are really doing behind the scenes, and all their spying is just another way for them to control the populace, through fear of incarceration (should they be caught doing anything "condemned" by the government) or through blackmail (just ask Weiner why he lost in New York).

Best of all were the points that Greenwald made about Google head Eric Schmidt and Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg -- both of whom attempt to delegitimize privacy yet do their utmost to maintain their own privacy when others attempt to call them on it.

2. For this part of the assignment I conducted brief Google searches, using my name as a key word as well as other key words like "address" "number" "court" etc.

-- Where you live: I was able to find my address on Radaris.com. It appears that there are several online sites that provide this information. This was the first one I used.

-- Where you work or go to school: This information is readily available on Facebook, because I have already shared it there a number of times, either through random posts or profile information.

-- Telephone numbers: My mobile phone is on a real estate page

-- Names and types of any pets: My pets names (dogs) are on Facebook page, again because I put them there.