Edward Snowden - A Year Has Passed

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Edward Snowden - A Year Has Passed
Wolfgang Pinegger

Glopinion by

Wolfgang Pinegger

Jun 28, 2014

One year has passed since Edward Snowden revealed himself to the world as the whistleblower that leaked hundreds of National Security Agency documents and exposed the true scope and workings of its mass surveillance operations.

The full list of NSA capabilities is as long as it is mind-boggling. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a list of 65 things we now know about NSA surveillance, thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden.

What we know so far is that Snowden was right. The world needed a public debate about mass digital surveillance and how the balance between liberty and security has been lost in the last decade (more precisely, after 9/11) in favor of the latter, and with no public scrutiny or awareness. Even president Barack Obama acknowledged it in a January 2014 speech: “One thing I'm certain of: this debate will make us stronger,” he said.

Problem about the mass surveillance is:

1) It doesn't work: Mass surveillance has been completely ineffective, as shown by a New America Foundation study, this raises serious doubts and questions about the validity of US administration claims that mass surveillance programs thwarted 54 terrorist plots.

2) It's not about security: There have been several cases of industrial and commercial espionage of late, such as the targeting of American competitors like China's Huawei, Brazil's Petrobras and – through the GCHQ – Belgium's Belgacom, just to name a few.

How Snowden Changed the World?

There are many more reasons, but these are just the examples.

The changes that happened because of Edward Snowden can’t be denied. There is a visible pattern of behavioral changes of the IT sector. A research has shown that almost nine in 10 IT decision-makers are changing their cloud buying behavior following the revelations about government surveillance.

The Snowden Effect: 8 Things That Happened Only Because Of The NSA Leaks

Michael Sutton, VP of security research at Zscaler said that European nations have implemented far stronger personal privacy protections for some time. "This has always been a challenge for US-based technology companies that need to appease European customers and assure them that privacy protections will be respected," he said.

"This concern has been heightened by fears that US spies will take advantage of American laws to access private data in the name of national security. However this is a challenge that impacts any global technology company, not just US-based technology firms as US laws must be respected by any entity doing business on US soil."

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