EXCLUSIVE: Ordinary Web users far outnumber foreign targets in conversations intercepted by the NSA

[WestCoastLib]

49. Anything you send over the internet is not private

I am very liberal, but I can't get too worked up over this for one reason. The internet is not a private system.

As someone who works for a technology company that takes confidentiality and security very seriously, we are trained often on how to transmit data as securely as possible and the company's bottom line depends on the ability to keep our data private.

The bottom line is any email, private message, tweet, message board post, etc. that you send over the internet is not private and it's not just "the government" that is monitoring what you do and can intercept it. An email sent to someone will go through a handful of hops before arriving at it's destination and even with encryption can be accessed at any of those points. There are people that can, will and do monitor your net activity via your IP address all the time. These people range from kids playing around to hackers in Thailand to foreign and domestic governments. With little effort and a little technical aptitude you too could learn how to do this from a simple google search if you wanted to.

The assumption that anything you are doing online is private is born out of a lack of understanding the technology. You may feel anonymous behind your keyboard, but assume that everything you are doing is out in the open, because that's closer to the reality.