Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr
“It is through this sort of unholy connection of technology and sort of an unusual interpretation of contract law that these institutions have been able to transform this greatest virtue of humanity—which is this desire to interact and to connect and to cooperate and to share—to transform all of that into a weakness.
“And now these institutions, which are both commercial and governmental, have built upon that and… have structuralized that and entrenched it to where it has become now the most effective means of social control in the history of our species.
“Maybe you’ve heard about it: This is mass surveillance.” — Edward Snowden
Dalhousie University on May 31, 2019
With international digital security scandals in the headlines, now more than ever people are asking, “As global citizens, what are our rights and responsibilities when it comes to privacy?”
This drove the conversation with former American intelligence officer and fugitive Edward Snowden at Dal (via livestream from Moscow, Russia). Professor Frank Harvey, Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at Dalhousie University, agrees. Dr. Harvey was moderator for the Snowden discussion, accompanied by Mr. Snowden’s legal counsel, Robert Tibbo.
[Snowden begins at 25:00 minutes into the video.]
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Suggestions from Dandelion Salad:
- Use Epic Privacy Browser
- Use OneSearch for your search engine
From the archives:
Edward Snowden: The Dangers Are Real
Abby Martin and Bill Binney: Mass Surveillance and the Intelligence Industrial Complex
Chris Hedges: The Dark World of Silicon Valley and the New Capitalism
What Is COINTELPRO? by The Anti-Social Socialist
Chris Hedges: Digital Monitoring Of The Poor
Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State by David Swanson
The Two-FacedBook by William Bowles
Thomas Drake: From 9/11 to Mass Surveillance, The Man Who Knew Too Much (must-see)
Edward Snowden: Liberty VS Surveillance
Abby Martin and James Risen: Fighting Censorship, The Surveillance State and Permanent War
America’s Surveillance State, Part 4: The Surveillance Industrial Complex
Dandelion Salad 
I want to be a fan of Edward Snowden, but I have issues with him after having read Yasha Levine’s book “Surveillance Valley.”
I note that you recommend Epic. I use Pale Moon and Epic. I’d like to know more about both browsers but for now, they are my choice. I jumped onto Pale Moon when I learned that Mozilla had jumped onto the fake news bandwagon. It’s a Firefox look-alike and I was using Firefox, ergo. Also, I can function (blogging for example) with it. I use Epic for special jobs. It’s amazing, with its built-in proxy or whatever you call it and downloader. It’s so stripped down though, that I can’t blog with it. I could force addons to it, but that defeats the purpose of a stripped down, 3rd party snoop-proof browser, so I’m happy to leave it like it is and use it now and then. When I want to use my PicPick (rolling screen capture), If it doesn’t work on Pale Moon, it often works fine on Epic.
I was alarmed when listening to an audio broadcast on 21st Century Wire and Patrick Henningsen recommended the Brave browser, mentioning its connection with Tor. I know from Yasha’s book that Tor is problematic. I left a comment on the website recommending Patrick review chapter 7 of “Surveillance Valley,” which I linked to. I typed out a condensed version of that chapter and put it up on my cloud service, Box. That chapter explains the problem with Tor.