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The NSA scandal was the nail in the coffin for Sillicon Valley in my opinion.

Why would any business or private person trust US-based IT-services or software when they are spied on?
Non-americans should boycott american IT-companies as much as possible and instead use services based in neutral countries, for example Germany.

In the longer term Im sure we will have p2p based hosting services with high security and no corporations, governments or boundaries, just like bitcoin mining. But til then, we got to boycott Big Brother companies such as google and facebook.

I don't know why everybody is upset with Prism, they were spied from echelon long time ago and nobody cares. They just changed the name and make some improvements on software.

To become completely free from the invisible NSA prison we also must boycott american Operating Systems such as Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS and Goolag Androd.
That means no more iPhone, Android or Windows phone.The alternative is of course linux-based mobile phones such as Ubuntu phone.
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

The magnitude of their spying has increased a lot compared to echelon, and today we use internet/phones more than ever. You cant compare the old fashioned spying on analog phones to the spying of your life on facebook, gmail, twitter, calls/sms and so on.

Actually you're not simultaneously on twitter and gmail, therefore the total amount is a constant sum of all. When you are on one, you are less on another. The amount is larger only because of higher amounts of interaction not the amount of services. But people never felt it so close to their activity. Tapping phones is rough detail. Having access to every scroll click backspace and moment of hesitation is downright creepy. Also a lot of people didn't believe Echelon existed.

Sorry, but you have to be a fool to be surprised by news like the Snowden case, etc. It's so obvious that both Governments and private corporation are violating privacy at their will, both for business and intelligence purposes.

That's why we have to avoid all that Facebook, Google, Skype, Microsoft, Apple crap.... At least whenever possible, because it's really difficult to be completely "off". And that's why we have to cheer both Bitcoin and Bitmessage, and all the open-source solutions that technology can offer to protect one of the most valuable things we have: our privacy.

My Question to you: Give me some alternatives for popular US based internet services for a European.

It's very difficult to look for "alternatives", as you cannot really control where your traffic is routed through. This is the very principle of "Prism", the program that allows NSANet to easily spy on everybody through the internet. The only tools we have are Tor, Bitmessage, Bitcoin and the likes - and try to avoid the corporations like the plague (use open-motherfucking-source) if you value both your freedom and your privacy. It's not a matter of doing or not something illegal, it's a matter of principle.

I agree
Prism or not prism, it would be dumb to rely on microsoft or google, etc when your privacy is concerned.
Just encrypt, salt, encrypt, falsify, encrypt, and secure everything.
In Europe, your local isp is spying on you, and stores your info. Who cares about some prism.

There you go : http://prism-break.org/

I agree, let me quote this excellent piece from an article I read recently:

Yes Sir. Fuck those pricks. But beware, believing that non-US Western businesses are somewhat independent from the US is delusional. All the West is part of the same "axis", and 90% of Western Govs. will do whatever daddy-US says.

The revolution has to be done at a user level.

I like the idea of a Ubuntu phone but if you're going to wear a tinfoil hat it's probably not the solution you want to promote. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/richard-stallman-calls-ubuntu-spyware-because-it-tracks-searches/

Android is open source. You can check for backdoors.

Ubuntu is not a solution. If In-Q-Tel (http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/in-q-tel) knocks at their door (if they didn't do it yet) they will sell to them everything, including their grandma's underwear.

I very much prefer Tails (https://tails.boum.org/) or Whonix (http://sourceforge.net/projects/whonix/).

Another thing, I really think we should ditch the current centralized domain system. It's fine to have non-US ccTLD, but it won't last long. We're going to need full decentralization, more and more countries are jumping on the censorship wagon. It would be great also to see networks such as Tor grow and become more common use. We need to embrace these tools that give us privacy.

Yeah, I'm not particularly fond of "businesses" as a general concept. I believe in agorism, still, it's a nice selling point, even for agorists, being able to claim "not subject to US law". I think it will be difficult for US to claim jurisdiction over someone who denies all US customers, blocks all US IPs, do not have any servers or domains in the US.

I find that very comfortable, after all, they do have one of the sickest justice systems on earth (imo) :)

Android is open source  ;)

who created and first used the internet >>next

The only solution of course is to start using open source software with homomorphic encryption or go to full open systems like Bitcoin that record your economic data but not your name... this way we all win, no secretive cabal can dominate, their effects are recorded because they are part of the system too and everyone can observe them... or with encryption not.

With homomorphic encryption there is no need for a third party security provider, another case of white collar industry being automated by advances in cryptography.

We can't bypass the spying all countries do regardless if you trust them or not. look at Libya, Egypt they found data logging software that
was filtering the entire internet... they were able to shut off the internet! don't kid yourself, everything you do and say online is being monitored,
they are just hoping for the day that they can tag all your regular mail, cheques, person to person conversations and filter it all so one single person can monitor all humanities activities.  This is evolutionary, data is getting so complex but singular people need to understand it so the advancement goes from increased complexity to simplification to more complexity and simplification this is how our pattern recognizing minds work.

This. Believing otherwise is pure denial of facts.

Because Germany never had issues relating to keeping long lists of names of "undesirable" people  ::)   ;D

A Godwin on the second page in a topic about the NSA and Sillicon Valley, Bravo!

Germany is not a neutral country and doesn't claim to be neutral (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_%28international_relations%29).

btw: Does anybody know if this is a legit service: orangewebsite.com ?

Good luck Prism, I'm behind 7 onions

Wise choice. Privacy is golden.

The notion that data transmissions can and will be sniffed is a given.

I'm too lazy to deserve my priv

A stronger move by intelligent people toward various secure methods can not be anything but a good thing.  Yes, with 100 or 1000 times the effort the NSA could track.  But commercial data mining companies could not.  And the IRS couldn't.  And so forth.

I'd say also that people around the world are not simply going to say it's okay for the US to datamine their every word, link and friend.  They are going to say "Hell NO and Fuck You!" to the US companies that are implicit in these schemes.  Which means yet more profitable opportunities for people to devise solutions.

May Facebook rest in peace in that happy LaLaLand with Myspace and Friendster.  May LinkedIn join them soon.  May they hold hands with Prodigy and Compuserve and sing along.

I didn't mean Germany is neutral as politically neutral (like Switzerland), with neutral I mean they have less intention to spy on people. You got lot of IT startups in Berlin, and lot of IT-companies in Dublin, and lot of former Nokia engineers in Finland starting new companies in IT / mobility / security... I believe the success stories in IT will be european companies.

Most people probably don't care about their privacy when the media hype of this news fades away, but businesses wont forget. They must move their hosting out of USA to protect their privacy and intellectual property and communication, their IT managers have a responsibility to their CEO and shareholders to protect their company.

Yes, it is stupid to believe any laws or any promises will lead to less spying.
Using encryption and being careful online is the only way to preserve privacy somehow.
Some people claim that NSA can decrypt all publicly known encryption algorithms, but in that case you have protected yourself from everybody else.

The NSA has purposefully developed a mythology on this issue.  More likely, they totally suck about as bad as the IRS or the EPA.

 ;D Lets hope for it. But as you may know, quantum computers will be useful within a few years and NSA is probably the first to use them.

Guess which organization are getting the first deliveries of the new quantum computers, they can do problems that can't be done with standard yes/no algorithms, quantum has a maybe as well.

Ubuntu?

You mean the company that sends all your data to Amazon?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8CNp-vksc

Huh? First deliveries?

Mind quoting some sources?

But it is not by any means the whole story.  Through our advanced comm tech, the power of the individual increases as well as and alongside the increased power of the state.  These war with each other.   Obviously.

But the individual represents billions of experimental paradymns, some fraction of which actively experiment with the interfaces.  It should be obvious that any centralized system cannot begin to cope with, monitor, control or regulate these individuals en mass.

So the state moves more and more franticly, to scoop up the last bits of data.  That's a failure of an attempt at a singularity due to poorly constructed node interconnects and guidance by political factions.

I see this similar to Obaby's attempts at gun regulation, just causing millions to go out and buy.  Now millions go into stealth mode on the internet.  The governmental system is subject to numerous single point failures, eg the current whistleblower and others like him.  How do they respond?  If they choose wrongly, more like Snowden emerge...

That's for sure. Pick your words correctly or suffer the consequences.