How the NSA betrayed the world's trust

This is a very good talk by Mikko Hyppönen. It puts a lot of things into perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CqVYUOjHLw

I know there are a lot of people that think that giving up privacy for protection against terrorism is a fair trade. And it's easy for me to speak, being from a country that don't really get hit by terror strikes. But the thing is that it's called terrorism precisly because it terrifies people. If you let terrorism change your way of life and the way that you let your government govern, then the terrorist have pretty much gotten the effect they where looking for.

Most of the discussion about the NSA leaks have centered around the NSA spying on US citicens just taking for granted that the NSA would be spying on everyone else. And it is true that there was always an assumption that the NSA did some spying, as do most other countries. But I think that as members of a (hopefully) civilized international community, one should respect the privacy of other people, and when spying one should always ask oneself this question: "Do I really need to cross this line that I'm about to cross?"

I doesn't matter if you excerise restraint because of you morals, or for fear of getting caught, but it is clear that the US intelligence services no longer exercise any restraint. And the world need to give the full force of the political backlash that it deserves. Everytime you decide not to use a US based service because it might be compromised, you are in fact giving a motivation for US based corporations to see to it that the NSA and others are not given the power to breach your trust.

And this big brother mentality probably doesn't even help that much against crime and terrorism. You don't need to put very much effort into being a smaller target than most other people. It's just the normal people that suffer.