Watching You

Today's questions of security are quite complex reflecting the complex global community in which we live. Confounding this issue of security is the addition of our online security as well. In our modern times in fact people are more likely to become a victim of a crime over the internet than one in their own community.
Today there are three groups that wish to attack you online. The first is motivated by money, online criminals making fortunes with banking Trojans or collecting passwords from infected computers. The second group is motivated by protest and opinion, like Anonyms. The third is governments and nation states, motivated by control and suppression of their own citizens. This third group is by far the biggest and most effective. Western representative democracies lead, allow, enable, and exact such action.
I will elaborate. In the 1980 in Communist East Germany the government required people to register sheets of paper so they could track texts. If they did not like something someone wrote they were able to track where that idea came from quite easily. Back then the Western world could not understand how governments could do such a thing. Now our printers track our papers with a series of almost invisible yellow dots that do the exact same thing and no one notices, let alone cares.
Allow me to make a modern connection. A company called Diginotar, which no longer exists because it declared bankruptcy because it was hacked, provides certificates to service providers like Gmail and others. If a website that has HTTPS:// at the beginning of the URL it signifies that the provider has a certificate and offers encrypted services. Websites with these foreign certificates are popular in totalitarian states like Iran because they are "safe" (or rather safer) from monitoring and attacks from the local government. That is unless rouge certificates are issued from government hackers which was exactly what happened with Diginotar.
The Arab Spring is also subjected to governmental monitoring and attacks. In the riots of April of 2011, looters raided Egypt's Secret Police headquarters and found amongst other things a binder titled "FINFISHER" and within it there were notes from a company based in Germany that have sold the Egyptian government tools for intercepting, on a very large scale, all the communication of its citizens. The company sold these tools for around $280,000 Euros. Totalitarian governments use these tools but so do Western governments. In fact western governments are supplying totalitarian governments with these tools today.
Recently in Germany the Staats Trojan was found, which was used by government officials to investigate their own citizens. If a person is in a criminal investigation obviously the phone and internet can be tapped. However with something like the Staats Trojan they can also infect your computer which enables them to monitor EVERYTHING, discussions, histories, monitor your desktop, as well as collect your passwords.
In our own back yard we are more willing volunteers. Google and Facebook have become the corporate extension of our government's information gathering agencies. Both Google and Facebook openly gather and profile information on its users. In fact information has become their bottom line; hence they have become publicly traded information gathering machines. U.S. intelligent agencies have varying degrees of access to the information Google and Facebook collect and use it in courts against citizens as well as monitoring terrorists, terrorist being a malleable word.
Think deeply on this. Most people say, "Well that sounds bad but I'm a law abiding citizen... why should I worry? I have nothing to hide."
In the video we watched on Monday it said it was a wise move for IBM and Coke to do business with the fascist Third Reich because they were safe and controlled, which equates to a steady profit stream. It is not a question of privacy vs. security. Privacy is implied, it is not up for discussion. It is rather a question of freedom and control. While we might trust our government now, any rights we give away will be very hard to get back. Should we blindly trust our future government?