Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

A Christmas Message From Edward Snowden: “Asking Is Always Cheaper Than Spying” (Video)

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appeared on Britain’s Channel 4 to deliver an “alternative” Christmas message to the world.

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” said the man who blew the lid off the government’s controversial spying programs. “They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.”

Too true, in this reasonable argument for privacy. As he also noted, if the government “really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.”

Another good point, though, given the day, let’s be clear that Santa has been using a magic snowball to naughty-or-nice monitor us at no cost for centuries now.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik