Big Brother spying is reaching scary levels

Big Brother spying is reaching scary levels

On Monday, the world’s leading technology companies, including Google and Microsoft, published an open letter to President Obama and Congress demanding reform of U.S. privacy laws to restore the public’s “trust in the Internet.”

This comes after what seems like an endless series of revelations about government surveillance from the secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Let’s start with the latest: American and British spies have gone into online fantasy games to snoop on players, and to see if any militants are communicating with each other dressed as elves or gnomes. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency is “collecting billions of records a day to track the location of mobile phone users around the world.” And we learned recently that the NSA hacked fiber-optic cables and infected 50,000 networks with malware.

Big Brother spying is happening at a scale we could never have imagined.