It sucks that I see news like this all the time and realize that my own government has probably known about and participated in these activities, yet I'm finding it out through corporate media/organization that have probably known for a while and still know things that they're not telling us. I've pretty much given up all hope in the US government (or just about any government) to fix its self without some sort of major upheaval.<p>The digital age came too fast for our politics to keep up and now the age of automation is soon to sweep through, along with a lot of other major advancements when it comes to interacting with digitized goods and services. Whoever controls the main communications vector in the future will be controlling reality, and no one is planning for it.<p>I believe the transition from the reality we know today to a reality based around augmentation is going to happen extremely swiftly and there wont be time to make fair laws (and figure out what laws we need to make), and the laws that are made will be many, and they'll be hard for the average user to understand, and they'll be authored by legal representatives hired by corporate institutions.<p>What we really need is a digital bill of rights written by and for the people, and rather than corporations and web sites shoving their TOS down our throats, they should be adhering to <i>our</i> TOS.<p>It's unfortunate.
If China is behind this, then they are committing a horrible crime that no free society can stand for, and the entire western world must band together to fight this menace.<p>If the US government is behind this, the best thing to do is form a commission to prove that no wrong doing has been done, and make sure these two "researchers" are punished as severely as extra-legally possible.
It's a tricky situation. Depending on what news is released you either get compromised by state hackers from the axis of evil or by state spies from the very hands of the PRISM companies.
State hackers really disgust me. Attacking anything or anyone that moves, be that friendly or foe, external or internal. They have no accountability, and no regards for potential harm to innocents.<p>Sure, history is full of state saboteurs, but it was in war time, not used to target your own population, allies, or third parties. They were acts of war, not to be taken lightly.
This is why it is the responsibility of Internet services to provide tools that make it simple to communicate and store data securely, for everyone, all the time. US providers need to do this to regain trust. But, in reality, state and criminal attack threats make tools for security a universal requirement.
I am fairly sure that our friends at NSA-GCHQ-Corp. would like it if emails from Ms. Whistle Blower were toned down a bit with certain names and facts removed. Or, even better, if Ms. Whistle Blower just ended up 'hell-banned', to never get a reply from anyone at The Guardian's news desk.<p>However this article implies that some imaginably rogue North Korean Chinese-Iranian hacker-dude from the Syrian Whatever Army is trying to plant Stuxnet grade virii on journalists MacBooks at the behest of Osama bin Laden.