First time I heard it from the Sky news, about some guy who traveled from Hon-Kong to Russia, and who revealed some secrets of American national security. So I did not pay much attention to this shit as UK and all western countries reporters like to attract attention with something special. After 3 days of continuous punching my brain with this occasion I sent some time to read more carefully about it.
As ex system administrator, I can easily image what happened. Government hired system administrators, via agency. Nothing special, as I heard many times “tight budget”, as usual MBA guys ruling the agencies are so lazy to move their ass to manage their job to organize special checking department and to hire proper people. Every time I see such a “Master of Bugger all” hired desperately by SEO to “save” the position of the ruining company I see and predict purchasing of the new HP servers, Cisco routers and on the top of it implementation of ITIL of some latest version, and for sure all this actions are possible for credit money. So IT agencies are not an exception, they wish to live they wish to eat, so they hire for profit, without using the brain. And as I understand, that is how staff is hired nowadays for government. But this is not my point, let these pee hole dandruff to do what they do.
The other thing killed me completely is the scale of what is going on. The PRISM system is brain-blow integrated in almost any piece produced for processing information, both software and hardware. Every time I read new release of the new network or security protocol I was thinking about innovative people, many levels smarter than me, trying to make this world better place, make it more secure. Every time I saw new OS from Microsoft or Apple I was always happy to realize that they less and less vulnerable from viruses and Trojans and other stuff. Meanwhile since Windows 98 I heard many stories and hypotheses about big brother access to any Windows powered computer with internet access, or ability to catch any e-mail passed via “free service”, or anybody with Intel vPro technology CPU volunteer provide access to what is shown on the screen in real time mode, and the connectivity is only limit. But these stories are funny fairy tails in comparison what Edward Snowden revealed and made everything (all the picture) for me so clear that it became scared.
Scare is the smallest word I can express. I’m not panic, but I started to fill the irreversibility of what is going in our world. Many projects appeared in Response to PRISM the other day like PRISM-BREAK. Good effort, but with such approach the authors of such solutions simply motivate the system to find the way of counter measures, and in the end we all come to conclusion that the only safe way to manage you data and information is to develop and to build own CPU and to develop and to compile own OS, but this is so obvious nonsense because it is not possible for 99,9% of all population, cause everybody nowadays are only “able to touch the screen” providing the accurate location of their own and prove their identity by their fingerprints.
I see no way out to be honest, as I said, soon or later all the open-source projects will be under control, OS, browsers, communication and chat software, hardware producer whose share are presented on western markets . There are not so many real programmers who are able to write the OS from scratch, so it is the matter of time when they all be either hired by government, blackmailed or simply exterminated in the soft way (car accident, food poison, or poor vaccination reaction). There are no real free firewall that could be managed by everybody without involving in basic understanding what is TCP/IP.
So what can you do? Not much, but if you look deep through centuries you will see than is such situation there was always way out. Who is the largest enemy of PRISM owners? You right – this is china and Russia. So you what the enemy of PRISM use. As for Russia they got their operating systems Elbrus, one based on Solaris 2.1 another based on Linux 2.6, of course rebuilt from core, not so fresh, but enough to survive. And on the top of it Russians supply now their own home-brew CPU “Эльбрус-2С+ (1891ВМ7Я)”, SPARC V.9 fully redesigned and made in Russia. The performance is about good CPU for 2009. I will do more review on this CPU later on.
As you see, this is not the end, world is very complicated place, everything changing, alliances united and breakup, life is going on. I hope that if every conscious person who realize of what is going on will be at least managing properly own data and communications and will impact with his example behaviour to several people from his environment, it could change the situation, maybe not in you life time period, but in several generations.