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DrewMThrowaway94 karma

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." by: Theodore Roosevelt(1858-1919) 26th US President Date: April 19, 1906

This fight has been going on much longer than any of us have even been alive, and by all accounts, we are losing.

DrewMThrowaway25 karma

I don't mean to be contentious or needlessly negative, but I completely disagree with this. Social movements are great for bringing attention to an issue, or for expressing displeasure with a particular policy. However, in this case, the displeasure is well documented and distributed, and for the most part, people are aware that it is happening. The problem is apathy, not awareness. The public feels paralyzed (a feeling which, judging by the comments here, your film in fact makes worse) and officials are bribed by the very companies that do the spying to keep it ongoing. I want to stress that by and large I found the film enlightening and well produced, however I have to laugh at anyone who honestly thinks that the way to end the survailence state is through changing your twitter icon or clicking "sign" on an email forward. In short, This is not something that can be solved from the comfort of your couch behind a computer monitor. I respect that you all need this professional activism to continue indeffinitly in order to keep your livelyhood intact, but that doesn't help "we the people" in any way.

DrewMThrowaway17 karma

I would assume that they would be taking advantage of reddit's abvility to make throwaway accounts by not specifying an email address to post questions in an untrackable format as that would be entirely in keeping with the theme of the discussion.

DrewMThrowaway12 karma

It seems to me that the core issue is the current legal interpretation of the 4th amendment: you suspend your right to privacy by agreeing to share your data with company X. Company X has an agreement to share that data to company Y who has an agreement to share that data with company ABC and agency NSA. So, I'd think this is more a supreme court issue than something that can be fixed in legislation. Considering that the majority of that court was appointed by Bushbama, I don't have much hope that they would rule favorably on this issue.

DrewMThrowaway6 karma

That doesn't seem realistic to me. However, there are a number of things you can do to minimize your online footprint. Use of end-to-end encryption on your online activity can make a big difference, along with using web proxies to anonamize your traffic. This won't do much against the government spying but it does make it nearly impossible to be tracked effectively by corporate interests such as Axium. The real slave tracking is with the smartphones, but again, you have the option of using Cyanogenmod, OPendroid and FDroid. That way the majority of your apps are open-source (meaning it's easy to view the code and find out if you are being tracked) and control what data apps can send about you. Remember, the enemy isn't the technology, but specific "bad actors" using it against you. For instance, you might need email, but you don't need gmail.