All Your Data Are Belong To US

It has become very apparent that something security and privacy professionals have talked about for a long time has become quite real. And I think there’s really no putting the genie back in the bottle, either, sadly.

Basically, once there was enough bandwidth and computing power, it was only a matter of time before all your electronic activity became available to anyone with the ability to harvest it. And now it is becoming quite clear that the NSA now has gathered enough data on phone calls, email, online purchasing, web surfing and undoubtedly much more to be able to piece together pretty much anything about an individual that they want to know. Who you associate with, who you don’t like, what your political leanings are, whether you work conscientiously at your job or surf pornography in your spare time. They can find out.

Of course, given the reality of how big data like this works, an individual person doesn’t actually know all of that personally about another individual in genera…