NSA surveillance raises real concerns about blackmail, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, the NSA is tapping into information that, e.g., Google and Yahoo were apparently sending unencrypted between their international data centers. One of the pieces of information that's coming out from these NSA revelations is that there is a ton of private information within these companies that's exposed to far too many people.[1]
From the point of view of political blackmail, there is every bit as much reason to be worried about rogue Facebook engineers as there is to be worried about rogue NSA agents. There seems to be some myopia among technologists as to this point, an idea that "NSA agent = bad" and "Facebook engineer = good" and a projection of negative intentions onto the former and positive intentions onto the latter. But at the end of the day, there is money in political blackmail, and it's not like there is no history of giant corporations engaging in political blackmail, or at least opportunistic employees at giant corporations engaging in such activity.
The internet as it exists today is a system where "private" information is shared between you and thousands of your closest friends at Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Comcast, etc. The entire system, where information flows unencrypted through trusted service providers, is naive and broken. It was been broken since the earliest days of the internet, with clear-text protocols like SMTP, and that brokenness has simply piled on over the years.
[1] While I don't support Lavabit's position of refusing to comply with lawful warrants, I do admire their architecture where the government has had to go to the highest levels of the company to get the information. It couldn't simply lean on some relatively low-level system administrator who had access to the unencrypted data.
From the point of view of political blackmail, there is every bit as much reason to be worried about rogue Facebook engineers as there is to be worried about rogue NSA agents. There seems to be some myopia among technologists as to this point, an idea that "NSA agent = bad" and "Facebook engineer = good" and a projection of negative intentions onto the former and positive intentions onto the latter. But at the end of the day, there is money in political blackmail, and it's not like there is no history of giant corporations engaging in political blackmail, or at least opportunistic employees at giant corporations engaging in such activity.
The internet as it exists today is a system where "private" information is shared between you and thousands of your closest friends at Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Comcast, etc. The entire system, where information flows unencrypted through trusted service providers, is naive and broken. It was been broken since the earliest days of the internet, with clear-text protocols like SMTP, and that brokenness has simply piled on over the years.
[1] While I don't support Lavabit's position of refusing to comply with lawful warrants, I do admire their architecture where the government has had to go to the highest levels of the company to get the information. It couldn't simply lean on some relatively low-level system administrator who had access to the unencrypted data.