What are the implications of NSA surveillance on the average Internet user?

>Except nothing has changed. This has been going on for enough time that if the average Internet user hasn't been effected by it yet then they don't have much to worry about in the near future

That's from the things you CAN see (I don't see ordinary people being harmed directly by this program). What about the things you can't directly see or measure?

Some issues that come to mind:

1) This kind of privacy abuse opens wide open the Overton window about surveillance. Today it's the secret services. Tomorrow the general government (from IRS to the FDA). The day after tomorrow insurance companies, corporations, etc.

2) This kind of privacy abuse harms directly people that the government, men in power, lobbies with heavy clout, etc, consider dangerous. Dissidents, activists, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, hackers, etc. To draw an historical analogy, people like MLK, Aaron Swartz, Mother Jones, Howard Zinn, Phil Zimmerman, EFF, Timothy Leary, I.F. Stone, and thousands more. People that make society better, or push certain aspects of it forward.

Those people ARE constantly monitored by the government, are harassed regularly, are being blackmailed or even made to shut up or disappear, are threatened with legal action for bogus charges, etc. It's difficult to measure the harm on a society's future caused by enabling the government to keep tabs and better control these kind of people.

3) It shows a huge moral, political and judicial decline that Nixon got punished and yelled at, by the media, for Watergate (eavesdropping on the opposite party), and in 2013 American accepts it's government eavesdropping, keeping tabs, etc, on virtually ALL Americans.

what are the implications .. you can't have a conversation with someone without thinking that your thoughts and opinions right now won't be tied and assigned to you forever ..

Imagine a highschool student who liked some band or political movement on facebook or talked about it on skype that is somehow tied to a imbalanced person who shot up a school or committed a crime? how could this effect his applications to state universities or grants or whatever? who knows...

do you trust the goverment that feels the need to spy on everyone behind their back to make a decent decision?

I've been keeping all of my work notes/journals/thoughts in OneNote which is synced and stored on Microsoft's servers ... who has access to those?

I don't want the bureaucracy to use my private thoughts, my private information or my private feelings to make decisions about me for whatever reason .. what happened to having rights and liberty?

tl;dr the implications are that you don't have the freedom to be yourself as long as this is going on

People will increasingly censor themselves. Not everyone, maybe, but those with non-mainstream views will increasingly learn they need to guard what they say on the internet.

And slowly, the greatest meeting place we've ever had will lose its potential.

... that's my biggest fear, anyway.

On a straw poll amongst my friends many of us are already self censoring to some degree. And we don't have extreme views, either, we're just cautious about how things that we thought might be anonymous no longer are, how jokes might be taken out of context in the future or links made between accounts that are meant to be separate.

We are essentially moving towards the Panopticon Internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

> the essential elements of Bentham's design were not only that the custodians should be able to view the prisoners at all times (including times when they were in their cells), but also that the prisoners should be unable to see the custodians, and so could never be sure whether they were under surveillance or not.

Since starting Lahana[1] I've become much more aware of the information we leak and the information that can be intercepted. In terms of counteracting the average Internet user, provided that Amazon isn't in the prism list (and I'm referring to Amazon outside of country) A private Lahana node may be sufficient, but I'm not making promises and would welcome ideas both to the contrary and ways of making Lahana better while still accessible.

Lahana was designed to be accessible by lowest common denominator non-technical people on closed hardware. At the moment as an experiment I'm building supporting infrastructure for Lahana, starting with StaTorsNet[2], an Anonymous/Pseudonymous twitter implementation based on Statusnet. Again, I welcome comments positive and negative especially if they can be used to improve the deployment or convince me to pull the service based on risks.

I've been looking at Mumble for calls, but am interested in alternatives with working mobile clients. If anyone wants to get together and turn this into a proper project, please get in touch from my profile page. I'm game if you are.

[1] - http://lahana.dreamcats.org/

[2] - http://r5c2ch4h5rogigqi.onion/

I'm just going to repost a comment I made during an HN thread on trolling here:

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"....However, on a general note, I think it is important to realize that every text message you send, every cell phone conversation you have, every post to the CNN forum you make, every tweet you send ... is directly attributable to your IP whether you use your own name or not. With Facebook and Google tracking everything you do, whether you are logged in or not, I would go one step further, and say all of these things are directly attributable to you personally.

I would strongly urge young people to really think about what they are putting out there. Consider this, the military was doing the equivalent of credit checks for sensitive positions during the 60s. No one else typically had to have credit checks back then. [Today...] you need a credit check to do ANYTHING, even things that don't require credit. How long before an internet and phone background check is standard in the background checks organizations do before offering jobs? [Saying that it won't happen is naive.]

I can tell you the military is doing this sort of screening right now for sensitive positions, but at least you are confronted about it. It still basically ends your career, but they will give you a chance to explain your posts. In the private sector in the future, they will just deep six your application and you won't know what happened. Or they'll let you in at entry level, maybe, and subsequently you'll start running up against an invisible barrier as you try to advance beyond the first or second layer of management. Or you will find resistance to you advancing into management at all.

Also be mindful, it can affect more than your professional life. Think about what the background [and credit] checks for apartments will look like in the 2020s. Or what 'dating sites' will be like in the 2020s [perhaps with Google Glass]..."

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That comment was made in a thread on trolling... but the principle is apropos here as well. Back in the 60's credit and background checks were not commonplace because only security agencies had incentive enough run that information down and collate it for a given person. Security Agencies like... say... National ones. Eventually the process was smoothed out so much that today even a rinky dink property manager in Rochester MN, or Santa Clara CA can run that information down. So they do! Whenever you want to rent an apartment. And employers do as well... whenever you want to get a job. etc. etc.

Now think about that in the context of a theoretical "internet and mobile phone profile check".

For an apartment?

For a job?

For a date?

For a lawsuit? or for a divorce?

or even...

Just for the hell of it! Why not? I never liked that lady anyway.

So people ask... what are the implications?

Well... consider "scope creep".

With information of this nature... the number of methods to command your conformity that the government and military can dream up is legion.