Ethical Assignment #3

If we take in account the US Patriot Act, we know that the government basically allowed itself to control everyone's data, phone calls, messaging, photos, or anything else if there there is a suspicious activity. This brought NSA to basically break the law using the PRISM program, collecting data of millions of people without any suspicion. Can someone break this law? Well you can, if you know how to. As not an american citizen and not having any weird intentions, I don't feel much concerned about my data being collected, but sometimes, I might just feel like I am being watched. There are many ways to go around this law. In the hacker world, the first rule is: don't get caught. But there are also, some other people that just don't like being on the grid. And yes, you can avoid being on the grid even if you use the internet everyday. There are many ways to hide your identity, or not even exist on the net at all. There has been a period in my life where I refused to have my name out there, visible to everyone and everything. I decided, previous to the awful social media privacy terms, to delete every trace of myself on the internet, but still have my daily dose of it. I didn't have any bad intentions, all I wanted was to be free from any sort of electronic surveillance. What I did was very simple. I started by deleting all my social media accounts, anything that related to my name if you would look for me on any search engine. I started using TOR and VPN to hide my ip and activity on the web, encrypted my phone, so that any data that would go in or out would have been untraceable (which gave me some problems at the time, while making phone calls or texting messages). I just wanted to be one anonymous user surfing the internet. Right now, whatever we write, whatever we search on the web, whatever website we look at, we are being watched. As my small off the grid period finished (because I understood that being off the grid, kinda meant being off the social game, which was actually kinda sad) I decided to go back on the web, of course limiting still all my data, so that at least, not anyone could actually see my life activity or personal events. If I wanted to go off the grid right now, again for no reason, but just to be surveillance free, then I would be breaking the patriot act perhaps, hiding my IP and all my data, creating a suspicious matter to the US government about my web activities. Is that fine? I think it would be totally fine, at least by my point of view, because I am not doing anything illicit, besides trying to keep my privacy protected. In the case of the patriot act, as I mentioned before, NSA abused the law to collect an incredible amount of data, for no reason. At least, they said it was to prevent terrorism, I see it more like it was to collect everyone's data, in order to limit people's freedom.