With terrorism rearing its ugly head in a hydra-like frenzy where even after you cut off the core, the affiliate cells only begin to grow stronger, it is only natural for the super-power of the world to eavesdrop on global communications in order to track possible attacks. This my friend, is the beginning of the end to privacy. The shockingly pervasive monitoring of global data communications by NSA has the world up in arms and as internel organizations met in Uruguay, they expressed desire to free themselves from North America's stranglehold on personal communications data from around the world.
It is true that religious extremism has a vice like grip on impressionable as well as mature but misdirected individuals who hang on to every word and heavenly plan dictated by their clergy. It is always interesting to note that these leaders never actually take part in the final part of this plan which regularly involves killing themselves along with ordinary, innocent civilians who were going about their day. These so called leaders marry numerous wives and consort with even further number of concubines while sending off indoctrinated soldiers to their imminent martyrdom, all the while promising bliss in after life. If this afterlife is infact so blissful as they claim, then what in heaven's name are the clergy and leaders doing on this plane of existence. Aren't they supposed to bid farewell and join up with their God, ASAP?
The point is that extremist indoctrination is going on in full swing and this has lead to NSA's pervasive monitoring of the Internet. We are now in a permanent oscillation between
chaos and control. The terrorists resort to sophisticated communications which include user-created Arabic chatrooms, hiding inside hardcore pornography websites where you won't be noticed that much. They even just leave messages in draft boxes and share the password so that there is no transmission which the NSA can intercept. Apparently, the well-connected cells have no trouble with funding. Even Osama bin Laden was a construction magnate who was immensely rich. There has been speculation about what was the intended outcome of the decimation of World Trade Centre. According to Osama's knowledge in construction, they had set out to collapse all the floors above the point of impact. But when in fact the entire building collapsed, it was just a bonus to these nihilo-anarchists masquerading as fundamental extremists.
It is in order to deter these kinds of attacks in the future that the whole of our Internet is being monitored. We are truly at the end of our privacy era. The future awaiting us is where every global citizen is a potential terrorist unless proved otherwise. The lower you travel down the societal strata, the higher the chance of citizens resorting to nihilo-anarchist tendencies. It is the neverending battle between the haves and the have-nots!
Coming back to the topic at hand, NSA has struck a collective nerve on the global internet body with its all out assault on privacy and unauthorised data collection. The rest of the world wants to remove themselves from the North American internet but is this even possible. The various internet organisations that met up included the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Internet Society. How can the world ever free itself from North American internet when ICANN and other important internet organisations are US based? The internet in its present form is truly a North American product, designed, developed and maintained by the superpower. The rest of the world are just tourists when compared to their hegemony over global internet administration.
What the world is gearing towards is a division of internet over nation-state boundaries. It already exists in China and the Middle East. Political leaders will espouse privacy of citizen as the concern to introduce this division, but it has the benefit of control as well. This a dangerous development if implemented in coming decades as several democracies have a skewed understanding of legal and moral issues. This is even more magnified when extruded to the virtual world. In India, corruption and bribery by political leaders are envisioned to be of negligible consequence by fellow lawmakers while it is considered to be productive to withhold national tax money in offshore havens. On the other hand civilians are put under arrest for sedition, when in fact all that was committed is a cartoon drawn, or an article written.
The formation of this nation-state internet on a widespread global scale seems further down the line though. As of now, the infrastructure only allows the entire world to be at the mercy of their North American superpower till Internet organisations are built with a global partnership, unlike the limp United Nations where only the few have their say.
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