Not surprising given that the smartphone hardware and software are very much propreitary in nature, and allow for easier exploitation since third party auditing is practically impossible for the entire ecosystem.

At this point nothing except a ground-up freshly designed and built system and either written from scratch software or highly trusted ones like OpenBSD (without installing anything except base system) can be regarded as tentatively safe, and even this security is gone once such system connects to the Internet since once data is beyond the system, NSA can still intercept and crack it.

We need clean engineered hardware, and software, and that's not going to happen anytime soon, so we have to make do with open source software and best security practices and air-gapping sensitive stuff, or not storing it in digital systems in the first place

We can say that while the open source based Linux/BSD ecosystems are without a doubt safer security wise, and better privacy wise, from non-state crackers and blackhats, it is probably at best only marginally more difficult for state players like the NSA to infiltrate. NSA is primarily exploiting the human weakness angle in it's efforts towards surveillance, and that human element is as weak in the open source community as in the commercial sectors. The one real advantage is the "many eyes" effect, which still allows for potential backdoors and weaknesses to be spotted and corrected, which would be hopelessly impossible within a closed source codebase who's parent company is in the NSA's pocket.

Indeed. Urbanisation is destroying the social fabric of India here, leading to chaotic urban nightmares while villages like languishing. These days there's really no excuse for tech to not reach every area, except for the most inhospitable 5%. It's just that our leaders and planners are too lazy, indifferent, or maliciously plan to divide-and-rule, or perhaps they smell money in cities.

Why should you give yourself a need to tap into the codes of others when militarily you are and economically you were, untouchable? Why not simply devote yourselves to building your country to greater and greater heights while acting only in defense against any aggressors (which you'd have had precious little off if you hadn't started so many wars in the first place)? The end of the Cold War and collapse of USSR could really have been used by the US to advance leaps and bounds in terms of science, tech and human standards, but instead, year after year it's shoving itself onto every piece of hell on earth, getting caught up in costly and messy quagmires, embarrassing itself...

The NSA could have acted far more ethically had the policy of the USA been one of just defense when needed, but no, the policy happens to be one of offense at every turn, preemptive offense in fact, and hence the necessity to turn yourself slowly into one big military camp

While China is doing a lot of research lately, until now the US has been the main place for research and development and commercialisation of computing systems, so any standards of such would have a preponderance of US influence through individuals and processes.

Good perspectives, and I agree with the need for security and privacy for everyone, but I disagree that an interview at Google would dehumanise you. Just know that you won't allow anyone else to define your humanity, and that all of us are essentially in the same boat. It's just that while he (your Google interviewer) might have some dirt on you, you don't have any on him, but you can rest assured he too has visited porn sites and done much the same blunders as all of us. If you're doing wrong stuff you've to be ashamed of it yourself, even if not even one person in the world knows you do it. On the other hand, if you truly believe you've not done any serious wrong, or have made up for any, and have basic self respect, you wouldn't let the fact that someone knows about it stop you from holding your head high. I know, not as easy as in words yet...

Concentration camps are whole different league to online privacy, at least several orders of magnitude difference between the two.

Having said all this, yes, I do agree the Internet in it's early days afforded us the ability to be at least psuedo-anonymous from everyone except government and law enforcement, and now it's too bad that any old company can store data on you, while both companies and governments are increasingly eroding the little shreds of privacy still left by things like mandating real name, blocking proxies, and so on.

The "backdoors" leak from Snowden shows how money and threats corrupt even large corporations to speak nothing of small VPN companies. I wouldn't be surprised to learn one day that popular VPN providers were incentivised/coerced by CIA/NSA and such into deploying backdoors. After all, very few people can remain honest when a promise of tens of millions of dollars is dangled with one hand while threats are dangled with the other. To be sure, this might not be possible with all VPN providers in all countries, but the reach of CIA is very long, and combined with the local govt's own secret service...

Can you be sure that any of those companies haven't been founded by, or are collaborating with the NSA and CIA? It's logical for the latter two to get unscrupulous non-Americans to start-up VPN services touting to be very secure and trackerless, all the while secretly in partnership with the Devil.

I would say not unless it blocks Javascript. Just using Firefox with NoScript reduces my fingerprint to 14 bits apparently. Enable JS and it becomes uniquely ID'able in the panopticlick DB.

Yes exactly. The super rich, the militarily powerful and the elite the world over are building systems to spy on each other and try to out-compete each other in a race without any clear destination in sight. But meanwhile the systems and resources they're building to achieve their nebulous goals have now become lethally effective in quelling any call from ordinary people for accountability, transparency and democracy. In others words when X (substitute this with NSA or PLA or whatever you want) is effective against it's foreign counterparts, it'll be practically invulnerable to it's own citizens, the ordinary people. In the end, it's an overall rat-race where the fanatics, the fundamentalists, the megalomaniacs, the super-greedy and the super-rich people around the world are effectively ruining the whole planet for the "rest of us," who want genuine progress in science, environment, human standards of living, peace and so on.

Couldn't agree more. Also the majority of comments from Americans who are outraged at the NSA activities seem to indicate they're so pissed off only because it has now been shown that NSA is *also* spying on Americans! This is exactly the same "Who cares about the other guys" mentality that has led the NSA and the higher echelons of America's politicians and military to act like this: to them, the majority of America's people have also now become "others," and hence the casual treatment of American laws and citizens as well. Non-Americans are "others with no rights, not even human rights" while American citizens are "others with least possible rights."

The enemies these days are good at blending in.

I'm more interested in security rather than privacy. What's the worst that can happen? Targeted ads? I block ads anyway. Future employer might look at my Facebook posts? He's welcome to... it might educate him. Bank may refuse loan? I care two hoots. My govt or NSA can track me down? Lol that'd be a really stupid thing on their part. What I wouldn't want though are insecure systems which could enable my accounts to get hacked or my transactions to be compromised.