These days I’m a visitor at Chaos Computer Club Congress #30C3 in Hamburg, the biggest european meeting for hacks and hackers. Germany has recently become a haven for internet/information activists, guesting people like Laura Poitras or Jacob Appelbaum. No surprise the issue around the governmental eavesdropping on literally everyone made public by Ed Snowden is a big deal at the congress. I attended a talk that dissected the German governments communication on the subject word for word, cutting out the mere bullshit, shallow phrases and shell-words, leaving – nothing. Not a single argument. As if they didn’t even consider arguing with the so called «public».
Once you’re confronted with the bizarre and dysfunctional argumentation by the government, carefully hushed up by hoards of communication experts – once you see the obvious lies exposed naked in front of you, you only start to realize how bad the state of democracy has become. As Glenn Greenwald put it in his Keynote-Speech, the spying has reversed the understanding of privacy und publicity: «We as private individuals have almost no privacy, they as public figures [..] have almost no transparency.»
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEJIR0-KJu0