+Tim O'Reilly of course I do not state that everyone in your government (federal, country and county) is evil and for sure most citizens are not evil, only soothingly kept ignorant of those issues.
Being a European citizen all I can do in this is give moral support. More generally I chose to buy my services where legislation is more citizen friendly, like Switzerland or Austria or Germany.
Even European countries obviously have their their privacy related problem, and also about civil rights and citizen control over government.
I must looked like sarcastic and bitter when I almost quoted a distorted Franklin.
Nevertheless it seems that currently the USA and UK government have chosen to trade security for freedom.
I do warmly hope that you and your fellow citizens will be successful with the positive lobby action to stop your government making such gross errors.
I'm not qualified to make a reliable reasonings about it but it seems to me that USA federal government has begun to walk a dark path, making enemies at every step during the last years. They see enemies everywhere, even among their citizens.
I discovered how important is freedom during my humble path in information technology and as far as I can understand federal government has made illegal to uncover and publish the illegal acts made by the government itself. In that case it's quite a substantial loss of freedom, turning your state in something that looks like a democracy but underneath resembles a fascist regime, based on bureaucracy and military.
Already two well-known companies offering secure crypted mail has been shut down and their owner cannot even talk about it. How can this be fertile land for hackers interested in cryptography? Certainly they are smart enough to avoid coming in USA.
They will flee in privacy aware countries like New Zealand or Germany, certainly not where they can be arrested because they have developed some software.
This must be stopped and must be stopped now and here. Otherwise we will resemble in a few years like the rogue states we wanted to fight.
In IT I suggest to smoothly shift away from gratis services that are paid selling data about their users. Freedom has a price and thus price today is your privacy. So I warmly welcome projects like
#diaspora and
#friendica that decentralise social networking and I'm seriously considering to setup a paid personal server to host them, along with
#yacy the decentralized search engine.
Long life and prosperity
