You can now count on a “Snowden Sunday” every few weeks: some jaw-dropping revelation that if you had suggested it a few years ago people would have dismissed you as a tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid. Now the hardest part is not becoming numb. Here’s the latest from The Washington Post: In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are. Bonus: CIA employee’s quest to release information ‘destroyed my entire career.’
so i imagine it’s pretty clear where you fall in the “patriot” (many folks) vs minority “traitor” opinion (e.g. pmarca) debate. 🙂
Pretty much. 🙂 Regardless of Snowden’s ultimate verdict, I think these sorts of things are corrosive to a free society.
Well, either tin foil faction, or taking main stream fiction like Tom Clancy or the BBC’s Spooks at face value.
Very happy to hear your thoughts on this, since I’ve been wondering where WordPress/Automattic stands on these issues. With WordPress growing, I’ve come to expect that you are getting proposals from authorities the same way Google and Twitter do. Personally I’ve chosen to trust WordPress, but for more privacy-minded clients I don’t use Jetpack for stats/comments anymore and I disable Google fonts. I was gonna suggest a transparency report, and then I saw that you already *have* one! Great, I’m gonna check it out now! 🙂
Because we’re about publishing, not keeping things private, we actually don’t get a ton of requests. For products we do have like Simplenote I’m interested long-term in doing things like client-side encryption so we couldn’t turn things over even if we were forced to.
True patriots are those who have the guts to disclose government abuses, forfeiting their freedoms for the rest of us.
Whenever I hear “Snowden” or “NSA”, I want to use fdd again instead of www 🙂