Government Surveillance - TED Talk

[vivster]

padib said:

vivster said:
As a network security professional I can't stop laughing and crying at the same time.
Laughing because what he talks about is extremely oversimplified and exaggerated and crying because there are enough people who actually are paranoid enough to believe in this.

There is a big gap between what is theoretically possible and what is practically possible. After that there is another big gap between what is actually possible and what is actually done.

While such presentations shed a bit of light on the operations behind the scenes it is doing more harm than to actually educate people. It scares enough people to an extend that is influencing them more than the real surveillance threat.

You are a network security professional, and you're probably great at what you do, but these people are specialized in hacking. Keep in mind that even though security measures exist to counter the measures these businesses employ, most unsuspecting users don't make use of them.

I think laughing is a bit of an overreaction for you, since you pretend to know more than the person in the TED Talk. Keep in mind this person has done his research.

Understanding hacking is a big part of network security.

I never said I know more. I'm pretty much just a freshman since I'm just doing what I do for like 3 years. I just said he oversimplifies it for the audience. And if you oversimplify it then the audience will take things the wrong way and start thinking the government is actually spying on unsuspecting citizens. Which I think he intended. Even the word spying is misused. It only spies on its targets. Normal citizens maybe get their data tapped but no human soul will ever see them as it's just that big amount of data that bots have to sift through it and discarding 99,99% of the data. Nobody at the government cares about you sitting in front of your kinect or laptop.

Yes, a lot of things are possible but most of them are only possible in certain circumstances and often require actual action from the user itself. You can't just go and say: "I'm gonna hack that target". You need to do a lot of research and patience to target a single individuum and actually spy on it. You can't do that to millions of internet users. That's why it's only practical for them to only care about their actual targets aka criminals.

However the media and people like hime make it deliberately seem like bad people and the government are constantly spying on you when you jack off in front of your laptop. That is misleading and spreading unnecessary fear.