"Already, a number of European tech companies are promoting their emails and chat services as an alternative to offerings from Google and Facebook, trumpeting the fact that they do not -- and will not -- provide user data to the NSA," Greenwald writes in the epilogue to "No Place to Hide."
Snowden himself has gone even further. Speaking by video-conference to the South by Southwest conference in March, he urged developers, cryptographers, and privacy activists to make mass surveillance significantly more expensive for government agencies -- if not impossible.
According to The New York Times, one of the audience twittered a question. Could any data ever be truly safe from a malicious hacker or the NSA?
"Let's put it this way," Snowden said with a bit of a laugh...
"The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with journalists, and they still have no idea you know what documents were provided to the journalists, what they have, what they don't have, because encryption works."
In other words, the surveillance state is neither inevitable nor unbeatable, and it's oxymoronic to think that it is.
*A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
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