It’s hard to talk about what we talk about on Twitter these days without mentioning the National Security Agency or the current status of Congressional votes on whether the U.S. should stage a military strike on Syria. Above all, these are the two topics that dominated the public discourse I saw unfold on Twitter this week.
Since the first of many Guardian reports documenting leaks from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden came out in early June, my Twitter stream has been filled with running commentary on the state of digital privacy and the potential dangers of government overreach. NSA whistleblowers tweeted with renewed vigor this week after a new joint report from the New York Times, ProPublica, and the Guardian revealed the NSA has either cracked or found ways around most of the encryption methods that protect sensitive information on the Internet (think emails, passwords, medical records, and banking and commerce systems.)
The activist Sean Bonner voiced a reaction echoed by many of the people I follow on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/seanbonner/status/375816665037938688
As did Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke the Guardian‘s first exposé on the NSA:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/375715382138380289
Amidst the noise, however, was at least one optimist: the journalist Quinn Norton, who writes about the Internet and hacker culture, and who this week published a Medium post that contemplates America’s reaction to former U.S. Army soldier and WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning:
