Haystack, how the hackers are going to bring us freedom

H/t to Kevin Carson writing at the Centre for a Stateless Society yesterday for binging this to my attention.  Way back I wrote about how whether our futures are free or totalitarian will likely be down to the fiendishly clever folks who hack away at systems, finding a ay through a firewall here, a method of covering our tracks there.  There are lots of potential internet based technologies that could lock the state out of our private lives, preventing them seeing what we are looking at, finding out how much money we have or are making or spending and so on.

The ironic thing about something like Haystack, intended to protect internet users in Iran from the heavy surveillance their government imposes on such activity, is that the US State Department are assisting with the project because they recognise it as a way of undermining an "enemy" state.  Can they really be so stupid as to not realise that things like this are likely to be the way we undermine their state surveillance in the future I wonder?

Meantime, in Britain, we no longer need intrusive central surveillance; big momma down the road is watching you: