In today’s day and age everything you do is under the microscope. Last week we went over the concept of cancel culture and what you post online can be subject of ridicule by your peers and fans. This week we dove into the concept on everything you do online can be dug up by hackers or allegedly the us government. It is not only online, that is mostly businesses that track your spending habits to know what kind of ads to give you. Where the government becomes involved, they start tracking your phone calls and listening to what has been said. This is all in order to try and stop terror attacks before they happen, but at what cost to the American people?

This week the big topic on the syllabus was the movie Snowden. This movie was really tied into what I was talking about earlier, but the thing is this is a real story. This movie hit home way more to methane the Black Mirror episodes because of how real it seemed. The Black Mirror episodes were all just things in the dystopian future that probably won’t happen, at least for a while to us, but this literally happened. In Snowden long story short, Edward Snowden is a ex army soldier who looks for a job with the CIA and eventually works with the NSA also. During that time, a few years after 9/11, they are big on the surveillance of the American people to help aid in stopping the next 9/11. It goes without saying that this is a big infringement on our rights as citizens and makes me personally feel unsafe in that regard.

The movie takes into an interesting turn when we find out how many hackers we have to hack into other countries’ infrastructure to survey them and see what they are planning to do to the United States, or other allied countries. We find out that these bases are spread out all over the world pretty much spying on the countries, which I am actually a fan of in some regards because it makes me feel safe, without having them literally spying on the American people. Snowden does not feel right with what he is doing, so he smuggles the info out of his work and sneaks over to Russia where he leaks the information for the world to see.

I do not want to focus so much on if what he did was treason or not, I am more trying to figure out what they are doing to us and what they are doing with our information. If you just take a browse of the wikipedia of the list of data breaches or take at the look of articles about the 5 biggest data breaches, first you see that yahoo really needs to hire a new security team, and second you see the scary about of info hackers can get just from one breach. In the ABC article “The Capital One data breach is alarming, but these are the 5 worst corporate hacks”, it is stated that “The hackers also obtained the security questions and backup email addresses used to reset lost passwords, which are key to hacking into government computers.” Personally that really makes me nervous because I don’t want any of my information with strangers across the globe trying to make money off of me. This is a problem that I think we are really working hard to fix, and I think most of the big companies are really making good strides to prevent this.

My question to you is, do you think that Snowden did the right thing in telling us about this information?

check out this article about President Trump getting COVID.https://nypost.com/2020/10/02/donald-trump-joins-list-of-world-leaders-to-test-positive-for-covid-19/