Social Privacy: What Isn't the NSA Spying On? If the Answer Is Everything, So What?

Another day, another Snowden leak (CNET).  Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks join the list of folks, sites, and whatever (rolling my eyes) that the NSA and quickly possibly other clandestine agencies are "keeping an eye" on.

What's interesting is that in the post, the newly released docs state that both the NSA and Britain's GCHQ, their version of the NSA, record all the IP addresses of anyone who visits these sites like WikiLeaks.

Alright then, never been to WikiLeaks?  Well, CNET's post includes a link to a WikiLeaks url on to the official statement from Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder, expressing his outrage.  Yeah, go ahead and click through and have your IP address be recorded and wait for no one to show up at your door because of it.

But if you're a hacker or whatever, you would be able to proudly proclaim to your fellows that you're being watch by Big Brother and, any minute now, no one at Fort Meade or wherever GCHQ is located in the UK.

And my guess is that you probably got yourself noted by the Russians, Chinese, French, Israeli...I don't know...aliens?

I know that this is a serious matter and that something must be done to make sure privacy is respected and that governments are never allowed to overreach.  Have we reached this point?  The worry is that we are inching closer to closer to a Big Brother era.  And while we are keeping an eye on what the governments are doing, commercial breaches of trust and privacy is happening with greater frequency.

I think we need to agree on one thing about clandestine surveillance.  We're never going to see a clear thin line about it.  Instead, it's going to be a field of fuzzy white, black, and every shades of gray in between and all sides will keep pushing the bounds.