Edward Snowden, as everyone knows by now, is the 29-year-old man who leaked secrets about our government’s surveillance of phone calls and emails. I don’t know if he is a traitor or hero or something else, but I do think that his revelations raise concerns for all of us.
As we realize by now, government and private-sector activities are dedicated to the amassing of Big Data that includes everything we do. Government is doing this, its defenders say, to protect us against terrorism. Business is mining Big Data to sell things to us. The more they know about us, the better they can develop and market their products to us.
All of this becomes relevant to educators and parents because efforts are underway to assemble a national database called inBloom. It was funded by the Gates Foundation to the tune of $100 million and developed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation. Should strangers have access to the confidential information of children and teachers? I don’t think so. The time to stop it is now.
As I read about the events in the New York Times on Monday, certain facts and statements were especially salient.
Think of it. Edward Snowden was a high school dropout who was hired as a security guard but soon rose to become an IT consultant for Booz Allen and Hamilton, a mammoth company that collected over $1 billion for intelligence work in the past year. The New York Times writes: “As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper, Jr., is a former Booz executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz.”
The story goes on to say, “The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that studies government contracting. “This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters.”
In another article in the business section, spokesmen for the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley insisted that they had to be free of any government regulation, because it would “snuff out innovation..Bureaucrats should keep their hands off things they do not understand, which is just about everything we do out here.”
“So the first mystifying thing for some here is how the leading companies–including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, and Facebook–apparently made it easier for the National Security Agency to gain access. Only Twitter seems to have declined.”
The government data mining program is called Prism. It collects emails, video, voice and stored data on the Internet.
And one more chilling thought: “In 1999, Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, summed up the valley’s attitude toward personal data in what became a defining comment of the dot-com boom, “You have zero privacy,” he said, “get used to it.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 