Issue 35 • Week of September 11, 2022

Revelations from Congress this week highlight that innocent Americans' privacy is still being invaded by our own government, nine years after Edward Snowden exposed the breadth of domestic surveillance in 2013. The program he uncovered eventually ended after "repeated mistakes" and was later ruled by the US Court of Appeals in 2020 to have been indeed illegal, though he has yet to be pardoned.

The latest threat now comes not from the National Security Agency (NSA) but Customs and Border Protection (CBP) who has stored the data of 10,000 citizens every year without a warrant.

But, really, those are just two in a long list of grievances from privacy advocates of government overreach. And we do not have to go back very far to remember the impact of corporate manipulation of sensitive data and subsequent inaction in safeguarding our online experience.

Why do we never seem sure of our privacy and what can we do to secure it?

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