Fun fact: when you say NSA, most people don't think about Nym Shipyard Academy….

18 Nov 2022, 11:25

📚Fun fact: when you say NSA, most people don’t think about Nym Shipyard Academy… The philosophy behind the United States National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program was famously articulated by its formal director, General Keith Alexander: “you need the haystack to find the needle”. He was making the argument that to “find the needle in the haystack”, or in other words to identify dangerous criminals, you need a pile of data (metadata) about everyone to sift through. 👁👁👁👁👁 Is this true though? The 5-eyes Intelligence Alliance of the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand certainly thinks so - the alliance was established so that the intelligence agencies of these countries can collaborate and share among one another the data collected on their citizens via mass surveillance programs similar to that of the NSA’s PRISM. There is limited evidence whether these programs actually lead to arrests of actual criminals, and if so, how often. But even if they do, the more important question is: at what cost? Is it an acceptable price to pay for all of us to be surveilled, all the time? 🙅 The clear and unequivocal answer to this question is no. Personal privacy is not only “legal”. It is a cornerstone of any fair and functional democracy. It is a human right too, enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 12), in the European Convention of Human Rights (Article 8), and in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights as well (Article 7). 📡 But if privacy is a human right, why is surveillance so widespread and ubiquitous? As explained by Ahmed in yesterday’s lecture, “surveillance is legal as long as it’s carried out legally”. And there are plenty of ways to carry it out legally. The important thing to understand is that the incentive for surveillance is powerful, fundamental and will never change: knowledge is power. Even if all the laws and legal loopholes enabling surveillance and mass surveillance would magically go away tomorrow, the incentive for surveillance will never go away. The more information one has, the more they can dominate and gain, exert and maintain power over others. 📱 This is why, even in a perfect world, we can’t rely on law to protect us from surveillance and grant us privacy. Privacy cannot be granted to us by any lawmaker or government. It must be deeply and firmly integrated in the technology we use. 🔓 And there is a long way to go, there is a lot of work to do. Did you know that this message you are reading on Telegram, one of the most popular messaging apps is not end-to-end encrypted? None of your messages are either (except for secret conversations). And even if they were end-to-end encrypted, the metadata of your messages would still not be protected: when you communicate, with whom, from where. This is why it’s crucial to privacy-enhance Telegram with NymConnect. NymConnect routes your Telegram messages through the Nym mixnet, hiding the metadata of your communications. “Transparency for the powerful, privacy for the rest of us.” This Cypherpunk motto echoes through Web3, which has its roots in the Cypherpunk movement. Having learned from the failings of Web2, privacy is a core principle of Web3, along with decentralization, openness and trustlessness. Privacy is foundational to data sovereignty, equitable ownership and economic autonomy, all of which are important aims of Web3. 💪🤓I wish all Shipyard Academy pupils good luck with the quiz tomorrow!