The Inevitable Spy

The positive side of PRISM

The US government surveillance program, PRISM, has been causing a lot of noises around the world. People are complaining about how the government could be spying on their citizens without telling them anything about it. Companies that involved in the program by providing the government with the data are service providers in the IT industry and has a significant amount of users using their services such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and more.

In my opinion, it is obvious that data that these companies store on their servers are unpredictably valuable. If anyone get hands on the information from any of these companies, the impact that could be done to the world with those data would be very notable. So what could we, customers and citizens, do to confront the surveillance of the government? Practically, nothing.

As more and more of our digital footprints are stored in the Internet, it is foreseeable that the less and less of our data and information are kept to ourselves. The government said they’ve stopped numerous wrongdoing and attacks, and I believe them, as most people nowadays can’t hide from the digital world anymore. Anything that you do, you say or even you think will very likely be recorded in the cloud, especially in the powerful hands of Google.

It is an inevitable evolution of our lives and we might need to start adapting to it, or those don’t will be the ones feel difficult to survive in this new world. There is a very large chance that after 10-20 years all our activities and actions will be recorded in the Internet and could be retrieved by companies and the government more publicly through a legally transparent procedure. No one could avoid being recorded, unless, you never go online and use anything connected to the cloud. If the Google’s Project Loon, a project which aims at providing Internet to the whole world, succeeds, seems everyone on the world could be spied on.

The only thing we could do now is to think of the positive side of this situation. You are being spied on, everyone is. If you didn’t done anything evil, everything’s fine, However, you would want those who are evil to be captured and prevent anyone from being hurt and this is the true value of the action of the government. We have the feeling being violated because of the government hiding their action from us, not from the data and information that they took from us. We should instead negotiate for transparency, suggest them to report number of request that they submitted to the companies or number of individuals of information that they retrieved regularly, which seems companies are starting to do now, except for Apple. We should believe this is start of the new era to protect and differentiate the good from the bad as the digital age becomes more mature at the same time digital criminals are starting to become more powerful.