Absolutely. Just as 2013 is the year where "ordinary people" have begun to understand that "the cloud" is a scam.
(And that is doesn't make that much of a difference if they store their data with Google, Apple, or directly with the NSA. If the blueprints of PRISM can't be kept from leaking, then subsets of the actual data will leak as well. Five or ten years from know, you'll have a huge grey market of -- medium to low quality, outdated, etc. -- surveillance data.)
Disagree. So-called "ordinary people" don't really know or care about this issue. They care that "hey, my phone calendar syncs with my Google calendar!". They care that "hey, I can listen to my music on my computer, my phone AND my tablet". They care that they don't have to worry about backing up some things (Google Docs / Microsoft Office 365). They care that their pictures can be accessed by their friends without having to attach them to email. No average person is running away from the cloud for this reason--they're running towards it because overall, they still feel it makes their lives easier.
In one sense, they're right. For the most part, they really don't have anything to hide except maybe a few naughty pictures taken at a less-than-sober moment.
What people don't get (and I do not claim to be an expert, just a cynic) is the ability for others to take two pieces of information and form a previously-unthought-of conclusion. They aren't mean, nasty or suspicious enough to even think that is a possibility.
I still hew to the idea that this isn't a technical issue. We can come up with all kinds of secure protocols and systems until we're drowning in them but it still won't fix the problem that large parts of our society are just plain broken at some fundamental level.
We passed the laws that allowed this. We hired the nosy bastards that are doing this. Hell, we made the terrorists that required us to pass the laws and hire the nosy bastards. Somewhere along the line, we decided it was more profitable to set countries on fire than it was to work on conflict resolution.
We didn't need a computer to do that.
Fix the philosophical issue because all the tech in the world is just a bandaid.
Moral of the story: Just like Groklaw, the ordinary people will stop trusting the internet because people in the know (in her case lavabit founder) say not to trust it.
Ordinary people, for the most part, trust the geeks they know to guide them through the computing landscape.
So accuracy isn't really something you're all that concerned with? It is my understanding (and certainly could be wrong) that the whole PRISM thing was the ability for the government to get their hands on any data they wished, not that they're making copies of everything. I believe metadata is stored, which is an entirely different animal.
It remains to be seen what happens to the general marketplace. I suspect we may see a number of startups specialising in organising face to face meetings...
Its not "By the people For the people" anymore. Its By those in power (who aren't elected, by the way) For those in power.
The slogan could be "It all ends up here anyway."
All the ones that won't use this offer can then be even more meticulously monitored.
And the year when we understand that we are all lemmings. I remember the 90s when people were afraid of putting their credit cards on ecommerce sites, and now they put their whole lifes and assets online.
The problem with what we discovered a few months ago is that the government can use fiduciary duty of the officers of these companies against the companies and they can do so in a way that guarantees that the executives won't talk about the abuse. They made demands for access and every corporation in the world knows that when push comes to shove, you don't want to piss off any organization that can unleash the IRS on your bookkeeping. And if someone does push back, its possible that there were additional threats of jail time for obstructing justice or contempt of court. Add to that the ability to gag anyone with an NSL and you have a situation that is wide open to abuse.
Unlike corporations, the people don't really have real recourse for transgressions of the NSA, CIA or LEO in general when it involves secrets that we are not privileged to, especially not any recourse within the capabilities of the common man (unless you are a common man within those institutions and you're willing to give up everything to whistleblow). Most attempts to sue get thrown out on state secrets grounds. All we have left is the ability to vote, but its pretty clear from some of the facts that that is unlikely to make any difference for most voters since the only people who knew what was going on were on the intelligence committees and even then both the ICs in both houses and the FISA court have admitted that they don't have any real oversight.
Facing this reality, I'm not entirely surprised people like pj at groklaw and ll at lavabit are checking out.
For a non-US company that does anything remotely sensitive or competitive on an international level, it's simply insane to use, say, Google's cloud services.
I don't know to what extent Google depends on foreign corporate clients -- but I'd be surprised if this wasn't something they were very seriously concerned about.
(And the recent revelations about the NSA are really just the icing on the cake. If there is high demand for some confidential data, it's likely that there will be supply.)
This particular slippery slope argument seems weaker because one would expect the government to place tighter controls on the data or the blueprints.
I would argue that the most direct way to prove the extent of spying would be to actually expose the data that was gathered. Therefore, after weighing the privacy of the unfortunate soul versus demonstrating to the world the power and pervasiveness of this system, he might have an incentive to leak the actual data, if he had access to it.
The blueprints are probably the easy part.
