A quick guide to our current privacy threats

Interesting. On the other hand it shows a very American reality distortion field: the government is the main threat to privacy.<p>Two things:<p>The biggest threats are probably coming from private companies and private initiatives such as Google, Facebook because of the extent of the data they gather about you. The most worrying part about these kind of threats is that they can be kept secret and can be passed by just one manager.<p>These bills are backed up or even pushed by the companies mentioned in the previous point. It's not the result of some crazy politician trying to restrain your freedom on the internet but these bills are very often the result of lobbying. It's because the government is not implicated enough in the internet that this happens. Private interest with (relative) little efforts can go in this breach and push for legislation because the politicians are very mildly interested and think it's not a big deal.<p>If you want to win this war, it's really necessary to identify the real threats and enemies without any knee jerk reaction of typical internet crowds.

They'll keep at it -- inventing new TLAs as needed -- until all of the individual pieces are passed.<p>I'd bet a shiny nickel that (at least in the US) the worst bits won't be part of any big standalone legislation, they'll be buried in some giant "must pass" spending bill. Nobody will realize the provisions are in there until after it's already been signed.

All of these acronyms are starting to make my head spin, and in turn apathy is definitely creeping in. I was all about doing my part to stop SOPA/PIPA - migrating domain names away, shutting down my website on blackout day (those 6 visitors really missed it I'm sure). Now it's just kind of like... what do I do?

A common maxim I've heard involving bootstrapped startups is that if you don't have the cash to get things done conventionally, you'll be more creative in solving problems that money would've been able to.<p>So when it comes to governmental privacy threats, I think the same ought to hold true- we don't have the power to stop them, therefore we ought to find creative solutions. I don't know where to start, but a longterm solution in my mind involves more than articles on the Reddit front page. How can we indefinitely protect our right to use the internet in the ways that we choose?

What did SOPA have to do with privacy? I'm only aware of provisions for shutting down websites accused of copyright infringement.

This is getting out of hand....

Silly people and their illusions of 'privacy'.<p>If you want privacy, stay off the internet. It's not yours.