On the NYT’s “Vast Spy System”

The front page of the Sunday NYT (not to mention the Saturday inter-webs) was ablaze headlining a “vast [computer] spy system” infiltrating nearly 1,300 systems in 100+ countries, including computers belonging to the Dalai Lama. The real news is the source of discovery – a team of four Canadian academics, working over two years. The story has some degree of happy accident to it, in the discovery of a webpage missing encryption, but the idea that discovery took place outside government channels presents an interesting mirror-image to the claims of China and other governments that such cyber-snooping happens outside their official purview.

Assume for the moment that the Internet itself represents one “vast spy system,” i.e., in the typical absence of strong security measures, most individuals have no idea who might be seeing them (and with camera technology, literally seeing them) across the wire. Assume that privacy is…uncomfortably…dead. One wonders whether it’s only a matter of time before similar, smart researchers are making a cottage industry out of finding who’s looking at who, and making their findings public. It seems…well, needed.