The latest Guardian bombshell reveals that NSA has gained access to several leading U.S. tech giants in a massive dragnet hoovering email, photo, filesharing and chat info from Yahoo, Google, Skype, Apple, AOL and YouTube services. According to Guardian, DropBox will follow soon. However, the government spying program seems to have a fatal flaw: It’s really unhip.
The aging NSA brainiacs seem to be missing all the cool and happening communications apps like Vine, LINE, Viber, Kik and KakaoTalk. This means that as middle-aged spies sift through AOL and Skype text messages, entire venues of communication could still be secure, even for American citizens.
- Six-second second Vine clips can be packed with information, especially if some of it is mimed while the soundtrack is used as a parallel channel.
- LINE is a Japanese messaging service that is so hip it hasn’t even hit the top-200 iPhone app chart in the U.S. yet, which is just as well if you want to avoid the lizard gaze of the NSA squares. The advantage of this texting service it that you can amplify your comments with Hello Kitty stickers evoking various emotional states… such as intense paranoia.
- Kik is a Canadian texting service that may be able to resist NSA demands for collaboration longer than U.S. messaging rivals like Apple, Google and Facebook.
- KakaoTalk is a Korean service that offers particularly nifty group texting and group calling features — in case you want to review your last few years of possibly incriminating Facebook and Apple iMessage chats with your friends and family.
There you go. Freedom lies in Canadian, Japanese and Korean modes of communication now that all the leading American tech companies have been compromised.
