Excerpt from an article first published on Collegemagazine.com
1. Don't Think This Doesn't Have Anything To Do With You. It Does.
1. Don't Think This Doesn't Have Anything To Do With You. It Does.
By using the Internet, you are, in a sense, sticking a pin labeled as you onto a map. The map is made of data, and your IP address, the unique number given to your computer for identification on the network titled "Internet," is the label. You are the pin. You decide where you go on this gargantuan map, be it Collegemagazine.com, Nytimes.com, Google, Pinterest, Mashable, or xxxvids.com--whatever, not whichever. The beauty of the Internet is that it is entirely up to you. For many years, we assumed another beauty of the Internet was its privacy. Sitting alone in front of a screen, on which we could go anywhere at any time-this illusion of total isolation seemed plausible, and for the overwhelming majority of us, methods of breaking into that isolation were so abstruse and reserved for glandular computer nerds, George Orwell, and sci-fi films starring Jeff Goldblum, that we decided to simply believe in the illusion. But as Edward J. Snowden has revealed, the government knows your label, and it knows the map. In fact, it owns the map. Private companies like Google and Microsoft harbor your data – all of it – which the National Security Agency (NSA) has had access to under the auspices of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) called the Patriot Act and the Amendment Act of 2008. If you think this doesn’t matter, you’re simply wrong.Because the government cares about what you do, how you do it, and with whom you do it, you must care as well.
The article appears in its entirety here: http://www.collegemagazine.com/editorial/3777/5-Takeaways-From-the-Edward-Snowden-Scandal
