In his latest Intercept piece Glenn Greenwald considers the recent defeat
of the Senate's USA Freedom Act.
He remarks that governments "don't
walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power."
Instead
of appealing to an allegedly irrelevant Congress Greenwald advocates utilizing the power of consumer demand
to address the failings of cyber security.
Specifically he argues that
companies care about their bottom line and that the trend of customers
refusing to tolerate insecure products will force companies to protect
user privacy, implement encryption, etc.
All told Greenwald's argument
is very telling: that society can rely on corporate interests for
protection.
Is it true that representative government is a lost cause
and that lawmakers would never knowingly yield authority?
There are
people who think that advising citizens to devolve into consumers is a dubious proposition.
Human rights charity Amnesty International has released Detekt,
a tool that finds and removes known government spyware programs.
Describing the free software as the first of its kind, Amnesty
commissioned the tool from prominent German computer security researcher
and open source advocate Claudio Guarnieri,
aka 'nex
While acknowledging that the only sure way to prevent
government surveillance of huge dragnets of individuals is legislation,
Marek Marczynski of Amnesty nevertheless called the tool (downloadable here) a useful countermeasure versus spooks.
According to the app's instructions,
it operates similarly to popular malware or virus removal suites,
though systems must be disconnected from the Internet prior to it
scanning.
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