Privacy

A recent discussion over beer and fish and chips led to the topic of privacy on the internet and how ‘hacktivist’ groups form largely to tackle this. Groups such as Anonymous operate en masse, en line (online*), fighting against governmental organisation such as the NSA in the USA and GCHQ in the UK which use personal data trawled from the internet for varying reasons: reasons which may be unknown to us, but we know they have quite intimate data about us.

Is this invasion of privacy that bad? Why should it matter that they are collecting data about us? What do we have to hide? Or is the fact that they are doing this in secrecy and just sitting on the data until something happens reason enough to fight it, or subvert it?

It cannot be denied that the core function of these intelligence agencies is security of their respective nations in the face of terrorist attack and the like. We are given convincing statements at least.

Josh

*Sorry.