NSA pins another badge of honor on Snowden

If the Director of National Intelligence “’blames” you for something, is that bad, or is it a badge of honor?

That would be the latter for Edward Snowden… again.

This time, he’s not getting the blame for a massive data dump proving that nefarious governments have been using computer technology to invade individuals’ privacy.

The director doesn’t like that Snowden’s recent revelations were an impetus for speeding up encryption technology. I would have praised Snowden, but Director James Clapper said in The Intercept recently:

“As a result of the Snowden revelations, the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years,” James Clapper said during a breakfast for journalists hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

The shortened timeline has had “a profound effect on our ability to collect, particularly against terrorists,” he said.

So, once again the government is saying that citizens’ and corporations’ enhanced ability to protect and store our information is a bad thing. He’s not praising Snowden’s efforts to alert citizens about the government’s ability to hack into our online lives and to move encryption technology forward.

I agree with The Intercept’s editor Glenn Greenwald, who said, “The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.”

But this is the weird, upside down world of intelligence. In that world, the reality is that the FBI simply wanted to use public outrage to shame Apple into hacking the San Bernardino shooters’ iPhone.

At the time, Snowden said that the National Security Administrator (NSA) already had the technology to hack the phone.

But the FBI decided to hire a freelance hacking firm to break into the phone — costing at least $1.3 million.

Your tax dollars at work.

But that’s not the only cost. As I dug around for more information to bring you on this subject, I found that there is a growing industry of hackers that will break into secure sites or servers and then contact the companies and offer to sell them the hack. The FBI hired one of these companies to hack the iPhone.

On an individual basis, this is generally referred to as “ransomware.” A hacker will access your hard drive and then contact you and tell you if you don’t pay some large sum, they’ll delete your information from the hard drive.

These are the kind of people the FBI is working with instead of simply going to the NSA.

Was the admission from the FBI just a smokescreen so that people wouldn’t freak out that the NSA can hack any system, anytime, anywhere? No, the FBI is too vain for that.

A department of the United States Government hired cyberterrorists and used them against an American company.

Are they really worried about terrorists, or are they worried about us? I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like they’re more interested in gaining as much access to information as they possibly can.

That’s why we have to thank Snowden and all the tech-CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook, who refuse to allow backdoors and other access to people’s online information. The fact that encryption technology has increased so rapidly indicates how aggressively the government is trying to access it.

Make sure you are following these 11 online security steps. They each can be done in less than an hour.

And, if you really want to make sure you’re stay as secure as possible, download this free version of the encrypted Tor (www.torproject.org) web browser. Although, since the FBI hacked the Tor browser, even it’s not that secure anymore.

You might be better off trying the Epic browser or the Dragon browser if you want to maximize your personal security.

You can also buy one of many “onion routers” that are available now in most major online electronics retailers.

Hopefully the battle of government vs. individual liberty isn’t a battle like water vs. rock, where water eventually always wins. Individuals need to become water as well by adapting to these invasions of privacy as forcefully as possible.

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