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What really stood out to me about this article was that they said the NSA actually pays more attention to those people who use encryption. So, in order to protect ourselves and also avoid prying NSA eyes, we should encourage people to stand in solidarity with encryption. I thought this was really interesting because I always thought that encryption would undoubtedly make everything more secure, but here they're saying that it actually attracts attention (which isn't necessarily a good thing).

When I was a kid, I read an issue of Superman in which he faces Batman's villain, the Joker. At one point, the Joker tells Superman that he's kidnapped all of Superman's best friends (Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and so on) and locked them inside lead-lined caskets, hidden throughout Metropolis. Since the caskets are air-tight, they only have an hour to live, and Superman can't find them because his x-ray vision can't see through lead! That's what the Joker said. Actually, since Superman can't see through lead, those caskets *stood out* when he scanned the city with his x-ray vision, and he rescued all his friends in short order. Same basic idea.

You can find anything on the Internet: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/superjoker6.jpg.

This is the results of a Pew Research survey in May (of 2015) regarding Americans' opinions of the NSA, surveillance, national security, etc. This could be useful in the security vs. privacy paper, to look at the public opinion on these issues.

This article goes over America's security and privacy trade-off, especially after 9/11. The author argues that we have done an excellent job keeping a balance between these two approaches and, while actions such as the Paris attack may make us question if we should add more security, there is no reason to take away the privacy we have as since 9/11 we have been doing a good job of valuing both of these aspects.

If you're writing about the rhetoric of the debate

You are still being watched, and your data being collected, so be careful what you send and to where you send it too. Innocent messages sent out of the country can easily make you become a person of interest for no reason.

This makes me wonder how ethical it is for the NSA to be so heavily involved in cryptography internationally. Are they building a backdoor into these crytographic systems? If so, how ethical could that be?

Apparently, if you use strong encryption, the NSA pays more attention to you.

The way NSA did to track individual's information in the credit cards.

Privacy advocates are pushing back against arguments from the intelligence community that more surveillance powers would have prevented the deadly Paris terrorist attacks. They're offended at what they see as naked opportunism from supporters of tough surveillance powers and argue the rhetoric - including suggestions that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has blood on his hands - has gone too far.

The article takes a look at why NSA spying is inherently illegal, and substantiates the claim with official documents. Great for pro-privacy arguments, but also a good counterargument to address for pro-security.

These people were prompted to create a easy, secure email service. They incorporated in Switzerland as it has much more stringent privacy laws than we have in America.

Great find! At some point this semester, we're all going to learn how to use encrypted email. We might try out a few different systems, including ProtonMail, and compare them.

Here's a podcast interview with Bill Binney and Ladar Levison, both featured in Citizenfour. Binney was the former NSA crypto expert we saw testifying in the film a couple of times, and Levison was the guy who ran the secure email service Lavabit that he felt compelled to shut down.

Quote: What you are looking at is one of the many undersea cables that carries inside it, to put it simply, the magic of the Internet. This particular cable, which runs aground on the coast of Florida, has been tapped by the NSA according to Paglen's research. Paglen, an artist who has been documenting the physical footprint of surveillance for years, got scuba-certified in order to go diving "at several locations off the coast of Florida," he says, to find and photograph the cables.

Gives you tools to make sure your information is safe.

One word of caution: This piece is from 2012, before we learned what the NSA was up to. It's quite possible that some of these mechanisms are now known to be insecure.

Here's a recent interview with security expert Bruce Schneier.

Good article about lawful deciphers for "better" security