Everything is On Record

I find it very, very difficult to believe that Elon Musk was genuinely surprised that the US government has full access to private messages on Twitter:

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has claimed the U.S. government had access to users private messages on Twitter.

In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, set to be broadcast on Monday and Tuesday night, Musk made the startling claims noting how he was shocked to learn that the government had full access to private communications on the platform.

The billionaire tycoon told Carlson how unaware of the fact until he joined the company and expressed surprise at the degree to which government agencies were able to monitor social media.

‘The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,’ Musk said. ‘I was not aware of that.’

I was warning people that nothing on the Internet is private back when the NSA was still supposed to be a fictitious agency. If you’ve done it online, it’s in the records of many agencies of multiple governments. Nothing is private anymore, we have been living in the Age of the Panopticon for at least 15 years and probably more, so it is long past time for everyone to understand and accept that.

There is no getting around it. There is no hiding it. So don’t worry about it, just be prepared to answer for anything and everything you have ever done or said online. If nothing else, it should underline one’s need for an Advocate in the afterlife.

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