Edward Snowden is safe from American ''justice'' for the moment, and he will certainly go down as the most effective whistle-blower in history.His revelations are going to cause a wholesale restructuring of the world's most important communications system, the internet. And that, rather than his whereabouts and fate, is now the real story.
On August 8, Lavabit, a United States-based email service provider that promised to keep its clients' communications private, closed down.The US National Security Agency approached it about six weeks ago demanding the same access to its customers' emails it has already extorted from big American internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft.
The company's owner, Ladar Levison, is under an NSA gag order, but he wrote to his clients: ''I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit."I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.''
The mass surveillance being carried out by the NSA not only gives the US Government access to everything Americans say to one another.It also destroys everybody else's privacy, because the standard internet routing protocol sends messages not by the shortest route, but by whichever route is fastest and least congested. That means, rtls, through the United States, and therefore straight into the hands of the NSA.
Snowden's revelations so far have told us about two major NSA surveillance programmes, both probably illegal even under American law. The first collects the cellphone records of more than 200 million Americans.
If one of those thousands of people ever spoke to somebody abroad with a Muslim name (or somebody who works for Siemens, or Samsung, or some other industrial competitor of the United States), they may take an interest in you.If you're an American who has never had direct phone contact with anybody abroad, they may then apply to access the content of your calls and emails under the Prism programme.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews such applications, has refused precisely 10 of them since 2001.Besides, the content of most Americans' messages can probably be examined without recourse to the judges under one of the blanket authorisations issued by the FISC.And if you're not American, or an American resident who once spoke to somebody abroad by phone, then you're in a free-fire zone.
If you are American, you probably don't care about that, because you are mesmerised by the guff about a huge terrorist threat the security barons use to justify the endless expansion of their empire (now almost a million employees).A recent opinion poll by the Pew Research Centre found 62% of Americans think ''fighting terrorism'' is more important than worrying about personal privacy.
But if you belong to the great majority of internet users who are not American, are not in a perpetual sweaty panic about ''terrorism'', and have no protection whatever under American law from the NSA's spying, then you will want ways to avoid it. And the losers? The big US internet providers, who will find that few of their customers want to store their data in American ''cloud'' services.
''If businesses or governments think they might be spied on,'' said Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, ''they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be [American] cloud providers who ultimately miss out.''As Jennifer Granick, director of Indoor Positioning System at the Stanford Law School's Centre for Internet and Society, put it recently: ''America invented the internet, and our internet companies are dominant around the world.
Television identity and President of DockDogs Australia, 'Farmer Dave' Graham, will be bringing his 12m pool up from Sydney to host the first dock diving nationals competition in Australia since the 2009 World Dog Games.
The sport was introduced to Australia from the US during the games in Sydney.Angie Burke, 56, owner of All Paws Paradise in Pimpama, started the first training area in Queensland after building a jetty over her dam so Mudgeeraba resident Karen Moore could train her dog, Zoya, for the world games.The women now organise 'Dash and Splash' Saturdays and 'social splash Sundays' for anyone who wants to try dock diving.Dock diving is the fastest growing dog sport in the world with clubs forming around the country.
"It is as simple as it sounds, with dogs running along a dock and jumping into a pool of water and having an absolute blast," Ms Burke said."Any dog can do it as long as they like water and they can swim and learn to retrieve a toy.
"It's a sport any dogs can do - big dogs, small dogs - it doesn't matter what breed. It's a family sport so everybody's welcome to come and join in and even the kids can handle their dogs.''Depending on their size and experience, some of the bigger dogs can jump from 2m to 9m from the dock, which is about 1m from the water.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
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