Concerns about government surveillance have escalated, and rightly so, since the cover of PRISM was blown. Since then, we’ve learned a handful of alarming things about the spying carried out by the NSA and other government agencies; they can, for instance, circumvent your encryption measures or even access data stored on your iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry smartphone. Disturbing, right?
But Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt thinks you’re being a baby about it. Speaking at an event in New York hosted by the New America Foundation, Schmidt chalked government spying up as just a part of our society.
“There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society,” he said.
But while surveillance may be the norm, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ok.
"The real danger [from] the publicity about all of this is that other countries will begin to put very serious encryption – we use the term 'balkanization' in general – to essentially split the internet and that the internet's going to be much more country specific," said Schmidt, whose own company has routinely come under fire over privacy issues.
[via Gizmodo]
