Money is necessary when there's competition in society. When society transitions to cooperation (and not what passes under that name today), only organisation would be necessary, not money.

Agreed. For me, I use it almost exclusively as a platform for keeping in touch with orgs and people involved in my interests (ecology, conservation, astronomy). The vast majority of them are on facebook and apart from Twitter, you'll hardly find them anywhere else. The bigger organisations do have sites of their own, but not the smaller ones and the hundreds of individuals. They have all chosen FB Pages, and so either I keep in touch with them via facebook or practically isolate myself to just my neighborhood in this day & age of instant communication and so-called global village! I don't post personally identifiable things like family pictures or sensitive contact information, so I hope I've managed to strike a balance here that works.

Well I do use facebook to keep up with organisations and individuals working in the field of environment and conservation. There's no website out there that can collate information from dozens of organisations and hundreds of individuals (conservationists, researchers, photographers) all related by a single cause, and present it. I don't use facebook for games, nor stupidly post personal stuff like photos, addresses, phone numbers and the like. Until a large fraction of all these organisations and individuals set up multiple accounts on multiple sites (many of them aren't even on Twitter, let alone G+, tumblr and more obscure ones), I have to weigh the potential privacy benefits versus denying myself of information interesting to me. For the moment I stick with FB for this purpose, as I figure even if they were to data mine my profile and posts, all they'd get is a lot of ecology related stuff, and nothing really personal.

States are fictitious entities, and what exists in reality are individuals. There exists a need to make both private and public institutions as good as possible, and that can only come about through honesty on everyone's part. One example would be private schools that are affordable and do not set unrealistic entry standards to intentionally keep out what the management perceive as unsavoury segments of society. And on the other hand public schools should also improve their standards and not merely serve as a last resort for the lowest segments. Altruism is needed to some extent whether in public or private life. Otherwise we get evil/incompetent corporations and evil/incompetent governments and there's not a whole lot of difference between the two.

For people like me in India, 256 kbps connections are still pretty much considered "broadband" and are expensive enough. With such a connection the security implications of Cloud storage matters less than whether it is feasible at all to use it in the first place. For example I've got about 300 Gb of data on my harddrive and about 5 Gb on my Google Drive which I spent around 10 days uploading with the patience of a saint! I simply won't be able to upload all my data to any Cloud with the kind of connections here. Besides loosing control of your data, Cloud is also dependent on the network quality, and that's the big killer for much of the world. Data duplicated across two different hard disks ought to be very safe, for individual users. Companies would of course need to maintain copies at several geographic locations. The great advantage of Cloud is mobility, but with storage densities increasing much of that attraction is getting diluted too. Combine that with loss of control and security risks and I can't see what the great fuss is about.

If NSA or some agency had got its hands at the hardware level, engineers and admins would've noticed it by now, just like Stuxnet was noticed. A malware that's completely invisible would also likely be a useless malware, and the moment there are effects to be observed, close testing ought to reveal it. What we need is cooperative internationally monitored agency for testing and auditing hardware, much like the standards bodies but much more in detail. If it's international, one country's engineers won't hesitate to reveal the dark designs of another country. Yes they can bought off but not all, not everywhere. As for using Microsoft, well for security a fully open source bootstrapped software stack is a minimum these days. Closed source software is just too easy to infiltrate by governments. Intimidating one company is easier than fooling all the eyes on the Internet!

Strictly speaking, no one, but that doesn't mean NSA would've got their hands and backdoors everywhere. And even if they "implant" at the hardware level, shouldn't it be possible to detect this by close analysis and reverse engineering, and there ought to be some way to cripple the function once it is detected? Regularly audited code-bases for operating systems (like OpenBSD) could be stored on international servers, and all it'd take is a single clean copy of compiler to bootstrap. At the application level, strong encryption ought to set them back for some more years yet. Anyway I guess we ought to continue to take reasonable steps instead of despairing at NSA's perceived omniscience and doing nothing...

LOL... Or concerned and highly knowledgeable people can invest in ground-up (from the hardware level) effort towards building alternative infrastructures. Not impossible if enough interested parties can come together and work honestly...

As governments become shadier, the impetus for people to uphold honesty goes down too. Slowly it becomes a "anything goes" situation. I mean if a common man does X he's branded a cyber criminal and faces years in prison, while if a government does the same, not only are they above legal consequences, but even above moral consequences it seems. The more fanatical a group/government becomes, the more time and money they start spending on stridently insisting they are for the larger good. Watching this over and over again in all parts of the world. In other words, nothing has actually changed, but just that what promised to be a truly revolutionary thing (the Internet) has had it's full potential crippled and poisoned. Now it's almost just another corrupt institution, but even then, it's good still outweighs the bad. Imagine what could have been...

I just use GPG on client side, encrypt, and then transfer the files to any cloud service. The service doesn't have the key and their client cannot get at my key. The only way would be to infiltrate my system, bundle malware into GPG, or use the rubber hose on me, all of which are rather extreme scenarios! :-P

Staggering hypocrisy on the part of the US government. The same country which has used Agent Orange, Napalm, Cluster bombs, Nuclear weapons and depleted uranium shells, does not hesitate to talk about the horror of another country taking it's own baby steps after the footsteps of the founding father of modern warmongering. Estimates of up to 400,000 people killed or wounded by Agent Orange, 388,000 TONS of napalm dropped on Vietnam... Where is the accountability from the USA for these war crimes? On the other hand it does not even bind itself to Protocol III of UN CCW, nor sign the NPT. God I'm fed up with the moral high ground being claimed here. It would be better for the US government to flat out state it's ACTUAL geopolitical interests in this war and wade right in (which it'll do anyway). A modicum of honour in there in at least admitting to be bad. Right now I see no ethical difference between the leader of a supposed leading nation of humanity's best values and thugs like Assad, and that's frightening and sad. And don't forget that it is the "first world" countries (not necessarily the US) that supplied these bastards with all their arms and ammunition including chemical ones. Plain military power rules everywhere it seems. Fuck humanity, fuck ethics, fuck values.

Spy on me all you want (my own govt, NSA, whomever)... Nothing's gonna happen except losing some storage and time! As for the laws that allow these kinds of unethical behaviour to go on, as long as we (people of the world) remain ignorant and divided by and large, there's nothing that can really be done. We *need* carrot-and-stick rulers and hence that's what we get. If the world were to become all nice and a paradise tomorrow it'll be too good for most of us, and we'd fuck it up and bring it down to the current level soon enough. So meanwhile people are fighting with various means to educate and enlighten on the one hand, and take corporates and governments to courts on the other hand, but this is going to be a long struggle. Unethical digital behaviour is *nothing* compared to the unethical real-world behaviour and no one's even been able to do anything about the latter yet...