See also John Brown, "Ten Percent Intellectual: The Mind of Condoleezza Rice."
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Condoleezza Rice Hiring Highlights Reasons to Drop Dropbox
The day started with the usual goal of writing about video games or even something else fun and happy, but I just couldn’t focus thanks to Dropbox.
You see I spent the better part of the day after I got home ripping my massive backup of all of my documents and files out of Dropbox, a tool that I honestly have lived by, in response to the news that Condoleezza Rice has joined the board over at Dropbox as a “privacy advisor”.
The first thing I did was check and see if it was April first again somehow like I had just woken up in some kind of Groundhogs Day scenario but with a whole new set of internet gags to pull my chain, but no it really was April 11th. The decision was actually announced April 9th quietly after a major event for Dropbox as to no doubt downplay the obvious backlash.
It didn’t help. Loyal long time subscribers are dropping the service despite many of them, including myself, have been paying good money for Dropbox even after its servers were shut down for a period. Why is this such a big deal you ask? Because Condoleezza Rice represents the invasive nature of our government at its core, and has on numerous occasions as Secretary of State under the Bush Administration not only defended but took an active part in the building of the current security apparatus that has made the web less safe and secure.
I won’t go on about privacy rights and encroaching government control and surveillance. All of those arguments have merit, and in fact I would agree with just about anyone who would say that the issues of privacy and especially a government spying on its citizens are a larger issue. I won’t deny that in some part my dropping of the Dropbox service is in protest to those actions for those reasons, but the main reason why I pulled my files (which happen to mostly be backups of my work writing about technology and video games as well as character sheets and files related to my ongoing pen and paper role playing games, and last but not least a ton of pictures of my two cats) is because these choices by major tech firms and the US government has made the web a much less safer place to work and live on.
I make my day to day living writing about these things and as Edward Snowden has demonstrated anyone with access to the NSA network could simply take an ongoing piece I’m working on and steal it from me for a cash grab if they so chose.
This isn’t as herculean of a task as many people would think. As a former system administrator and owner of my own tech firm, I’m well aware that all Snowden had to do to get his hands on all of the files he has leaked was enter a simple “get” command at the administrator level. All these leaks form the hands of a random contractor the government poorly kept track of.
Someone who’s paid a lot less or has an enthusiasm for games could very well co-opt me and any valuable game keys given to me by publishers for review or even sell access to my insider knowledge of the industry. This all made possible thanks to the internet’s giant virtual backdoor constructed specifically for the government to come in and keep tabs on me without me knowing.
The entire implementation of these backdoors shows that the NSA and the US government do not have the savvy to properly secure the US from virtual threats. When the decision to go down this path was made, leadership should have evaluated what would happen if the lid had gotten blown off, and it was exposed to show exactly what they were doing. The there should have been a plan in place to if their spying systems had been compromised.
This clearly was not the case , which illustrates the largest lack of competent leadership since Custer decided to attack Little Big Horn. People argue that this whole stream of Snowden leak have been orchestrated by the Russians as a way to hurt the US. But people must realize that these leaks wouldn’t exist to and thus wouldn’t expose the this glaring weakness in US leadership capabilities, if leadership had decide to never implement this ineffective and expensive program to begin with. Furthermore we have no idea how many times these systems have been compromised by other intelligence agencies, as it looks like anyone before Snowden could have just walked away with whatever they wanted and never told anyone for a long time.
The worst thing this has done is that it has killed trust in American companies, and I just felt that trust die personally with Rice’s joining of the Dropbox board.
Trust is the most important component to any economy. You have to have trust in a currency for it to have value, you have to have trust that employees will do their jobs to create a product, trust that bosses will lead those employees and help them do their jobs, and trust that those products will have a market where they will be consumed. I have no trust that my data will be safe and secure with Dropbox so I just spent the better part of a day losing countless hours of productivity migrating to a system I hope I can trust, but I probably still can’t.
I should have stopped trusting Dropbox as soon as their name appeared on one of the slides Snowden leaked as “coming soon”, and I should have listened to my gut when Dropbox kept giving me free gigs of space because when you aren’t the consumer you are indeed the product being sold.
As demonstrated the government and a lot of other entities pay top dollar for your data on various popular platforms so I should have done this a long time ago, but here I am trying to help you avoid making the same mistakes.
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