So, as much as we hate to admit it, it looks like the conspiracy theorists were right all along, and that the vast majority of Internet traffic is being monitored by somebody, somewhere - "Big Brother" is literally looking over your shoulder while you surf.
So, as much as we hate to admit it, it looks like the conspiracy theorists were right all along, and that the vast majority of Internet traffic is being monitored by somebody, somewhere - "Big Brother" is literally looking over your shoulder while you surf.
Now the question is just how much of your data can "Big Brother" really see? You see what most of the conspiracy theorists are missing out on is the devil in the details of online surveillance programs such as Prism, in that it only scans metadata, or the header information on whatever you're looking at online. Then you need to factor in that "Big Brother" is not capable of monitoring every single piece of information passing through the Internet each day - there are literally hundreds of billions of emails and instant messages sent and received each day globally and the manpower/computing power to monitor, analyse and disseminate all of that data doesn't exist at the moment.
The scale of this task is simply so enormous that you'd need to dedicate thousands of people and a handful of quantum computers (which don't exist) to sifting through all this data. Of course then there's the fact that most of this data is of no use to "Big Brother", or anyone else, so the time spent monitoring it is wasted.
The reality here is that governments can and will be actively monitoring people, groups or countries of interest - especially foreign governments, but as for you and me there's very little we'd be doing which would be interesting enough to catch their attention... or at least you should hope so!
So, as much as we hate to admit it, it looks like the conspiracy theorists were right all along, and that the vast majority of Internet traffic is being monitored by somebody, somewhere - "Big Brother" is literally looking over your shoulder while you surf.
Now the question is just how much of your data can "Big Brother" really see? You see what most of the conspiracy theorists are missing out on is the devil in the details of online surveillance programs such as Prism, in that it only scans metadata, or the header information on whatever you're looking at online. Then you need to factor in that "Big Brother" is not capable of monitoring every single piece of information passing through the Internet each day - there are literally hundreds of billions of emails and instant messages sent and received each day globally and the manpower/computing power to monitor, analyse and disseminate all of that data doesn't exist at the moment.
The scale of this task is simply so enormous that you'd need to dedicate thousands of people and a handful of quantum computers (which don't exist) to sifting through all this data. Of course then there's the fact that most of this data is of no use to "Big Brother", or anyone else, so the time spent monitoring it is wasted.
The reality here is that governments can and will be actively monitoring people, groups or countries of interest - especially foreign governments, but as for you and me there's very little we'd be doing which would be interesting enough to catch their attention... or at least you should hope so!
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