Berlin’s digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA
I'm going to quote two paragraphs verbatim, because they distill the practical extent of a universal, collect-it-all surveillance.<p><i>Anne Roth, a political scientist who’s now a researcher on the German NSA inquiry, tells me perhaps the most chilling story. How she and her husband and their two children – then aged two and four – were caught in a “data mesh”. How an algorithm identified her husband, an academic sociologist who specialises in issues such as gentrification, as a terrorist suspect on the basis of seven words he’d used in various academic papers.<p>Seven words? “Identification was one. Framework was another. Marxist-Leninist was another, but you know he’s a sociologist… ” It was enough for them to be placed under surveillance for a year. And then, at dawn, one day in 2007, armed police burst into their Berlin home and arrested him on suspicion of carrying out terrorist attacks.</i><p>This is not tinfoilhattery or paranoia, not anymore. Get flagged once for any reason at all, and EVERYTHING in your communication history gets reviewed, re-interpreted, with the already established bias of guilt. This is not even a perversion of justice, because the term implies that justice system was actually involved.<p>And that was in 2007.<p>I once quipped that Orwell was an optimist. In the brave new world we live in, that statement has finally lost its amusement value.