The Techno-Oppression of Ukraine Is Exactly Why Snowden Blew the Whistle

[villager]

Last week, Snowden said that one of his biggest concerns with the NSA's operations was how they increased the legitimacy of intrusive surveillance programs around the globe. The US, he said, needed to lead the push against NSA overreach, lest a global precedence be set for mass domestic spying policies.

It's probably no unhappy coincidence then that last week also saw a government engage in one of the most Orwellian uses of surveillance technology yet. Ukraine's regime sent a text message to protesters—who had been detected by their cell phone signals—notifying them that they had been determined to be violating draconian new protest laws.

"Dear subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance," the now-infamous SMS message read.

Such ominous instances of technologically-enabled oppression are precisely why Snowden argued that “America needs to take the lead in fixing" surveillance overreach in his online Q+A last Friday. "If our government decides our Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable seizures no longer applies simply because [there's] a more efficient means of snooping, we’re setting a precedent that immunizes the government of every two-bit dictator to perform the same kind of indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance of entire populations that the NSA is doing," he wrote.

As he was typing those words out on a laptop somewhere in Moscow, one aspiring "two-bit dictator" was putting a permutation of the kind of policy Snowden feared into practice.

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http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-techno-oppression-of-ukraine-is-exactly-why-snowden-blew-the-whistle

[JI7]

1. so why doesn't he criticize it ? why does he complain about Australia and the UK ?

[1000words]

2. Proud to be the first to Rec this

Thank you, Mr. Snowden.

[jsr]

3. Recommend

[sabrina 1]

4. He is right. If the US doesn't take the lead to reign this in, someone else will. In fact they

already are. New technology historically has been abused before laws have been passed to address the abuse. Instead of realizing, as Snowden did and other Whistle Blowers before him, how dangerous this technology could be if left unregulated, the US has BEEN the abuser.

Now other nations are demanding International laws to illegalize the abuses and it's a shame that we are the example that will be used to demonstrate a need for International laws.

[ReRe]

5. What. A. Coincidence.

That is eerie and scary, that's all I can say.