No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

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Just finished reading (listening to, actually) this book by Glenn Greenwald, and I must say that anyone following and wanting to forward the SAFE network should consume it. Greenwald does a really good job of putting this all across.

Aside from being a very interesting tail and really laying out the problems, it also gives one a deep sense of the environment we’ll be pushing the SAFE network out into. The level of intrusion at this point is truly hard to grasp. The level of vested stranglehold becomes very real.

Only decentralized solutions have any hope of changing the scene. Project SAFE is so timely that, aside from @dirvine’s brilliance (which I’d never diminish) it almost seems a force of nature–it fits so perfectly into what needs to be done. (I guess it’s not diminishing David to say that nature has brought him forth to help manifest what we’re ready for. :sunny: )

One thing that it made me aware of is that the impact of the Snowden revelations runs deeper than I think most appreciate. People can be pretty thick, but eventually they can’t help to admit to themselves and each other just how naked the emperor actually is. (Sunburn will out!) And if Project SAFE comes off anything close to as well as it seems it will, the field are really ripe out there!

Anyway, the book is available on ALL your favorite vias. I recommend it.

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Absolutely scary as it seems the adversaries also seem brittle and irrational. Hillary trying to argue for what seemed to be the death penalty for Assange and Obama being pressured into signing a NDAA allowing the US military to disappear people without a paper trail… The Hillary thing might have been for show and Obama was apparently able to push back a little but it shows how lost they seem to be. The recent article on Open Systems from Richard David Steele makes it seems like they will just cave in. To have such an otherwise powerful entity just cave in- centralization is brittle in the face of technological decentralization.

I just went through “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperty in a time of Brilliant Technologies” MIT Press. It left me with hope that some of our deeper societal structural challenges are solvable. A central theme in the book was level playing fields through decentralization and not allowing entrenched interests to destabilize society with increasing centralization.