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The Illusion of Privacy: Trust and Betrayal
Marivel Guzman | Akashma News
September 12, 2025
In truth, the lock icon was never a promise — it was a spectacle. It distracted our eyes while the scaffolding of mass surveillance was being erected behind the scenes.
The Architecture of Trust and Betrayal
The Snowden documents revealed not merely that intelligence agencies spied, but how deeply structural that spying had become. The NSA’s internal tool Boundless Informant counted and mapped metadata at a global scale — showing how many phone calls, emails, and network flows were collected from different regions. What made the surprise so sharp was the contrast: tech companies marketing “secure” services, and governments quietly negotiating backdoors or “exceptional access” into encryption standards. The Guardian reported that U.S. and U.K. agencies had “successfully broken or circumvented much of online encryption” via cooperation with industry and standards manipulation.
Encryption, it turned out, was only part of the façade. The metadata — timestamps, routing paths, volumes, device identifiers — was the building material of omniscience. Bruce Schneier famously said, “Metadata equals surveillance data.” Even if the contents are hidden, the patterns and structure betray identities, connections, and behaviors. (As explored in analyses of how big data and network analysis can map social graphs, traffic flows, and association networks.)
Then came Pegasus. This is where surveillance stopped needing subpoenas, legal justification, or even network access. Pegasus is a zero-click spyware deployed by state actors via the NSO Group and others. Once installed on a device, it has permissions to:
Capture keystrokes, screenshots, and audio
Steal messages, call logs, location data, images, and more
Operate cameras and microphones remotely
Exfiltrate data even when network traffic is encrypted
Self-destruct to erase traces of its presence
No padlock in a browser can defend against that — because Pegasus doesn’t attack the pipe, it attacks the endpoints.
In Europe, the PEGA Committee (European Parliament’s inquiry) found that Pegasus was used to target journalists, lawyers, and opposition figures, raising serious concerns for rule-of-law, judicial oversight, and democratic institutions. Legal constraints, in many cases, proved no barrier to deployment. The committee’s investigations exposed state-level misuse of surveillance.
The Reality: No Expectation of Privacy
If you believe that privacy is guaranteed by your tools — your phones, browsers, encryption, or even the law — you are living a paradox. In the digital world, rights can exist in text, but be hollowed out in architecture.
When you upload an image with a filename tied to your article, your domain, your server — you’re willingly placing a breadcrumb trail into the system. The webserver logs, hosting account metadata, CDN records, and DNS all know who owns the domain and where the content originated.
When encrypted traffic is analyzed, metadata leaks help reconstruct your patterns and potential identity.
When your device is compromised, no layer of encryption can save you.
We do not live in a world where privacy is a default — it must be defended, fought for, and designed intentionally. And often, the design is against us.
The Illusion of Privacy: From Snowden to Palantir Pegasus, Why the Lock Icon Isn’t Enough
by Marivel Guzman | Akashma News
September 12, 2025
Edited by: Akashma News (watermark, text overlay).
Usage rights: Free to use, share, and distribute with attribution to Akashma News and OpenAI (DALL·E).
In 2012, Edward Snowden revealed what many suspected but few could prove: that the web’s promise of freedom was under silent siege. Governments and their corporate partners were not content to simply watch the public square — they had built the ability to tap into the very fabric of digital life, from emails to phone calls, from search histories to location trails.
A year later, Silicon Valley reassured us with a different kind of symbol: the lock icon in the browser bar. “HTTPS Everywhere,” Google and Mozilla proclaimed, as if a single letter — the s in https:// — could redeem the betrayal Snowden had exposed. And for a while, we believed it. The padlock meant our banking details were safe, our searches hidden, our reading habits private.
But privacy, like history, is written in layers. HTTPS encrypts the path between you and a website, but it does not erase the footprints you leave behind. Your internet provider still knows you went to akashmanews.com. Palantir-style data mining can still link that visit to your phone location, your Amazon orders, or your political donations. And if your device itself is infected — by Pegasus or its quieter cousins — every keystroke is already compromised before encryption even begins.
What we call “online privacy” is, in truth, a narrow perimeter. It guards the tunnel but leaves the tunnel’s entrance and exit wide open. For investigative journalism, for dissidents, for the ordinary reader who believes the lock icon shields them from surveillance, this is the cruelest paradox: the illusion of privacy, packaged as its fulfillment.
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Further Reading: Palantir and the Invisible Web of Surveillance
Juan Sebastián Pinto, a former Palantir designer turned civil rights organizer, warns that the company’s AI-driven surveillance systems now shape immigration enforcement in U.S. neighborhoods and war operations abroad. These “Istar” tools — intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance — fuse vast datasets from biometrics, phones, drones, and private brokers to generate targets at scale, eroding privacy, free speech, and due process. Pinto argues that unless lawmakers and the public embrace strong protections, we will see these invisible architectures of control expand from deportation dragnets and Gaza bombings into everyday commerce and employment.
🔗 Read Pinto’s full op-ed in The Guardian
The Illusion of Privacy: Part II. The Three Layers of Illusion
by Marivel Guzman | Akashma News
September 12, 2025
✨ This section builds the skeleton: transport-level encryption, metadata exposure, endpoint compromise.
1. Encryption Without Anonymity
HTTPS does one job well: it encrypts the stream of data between your browser and a server. A hacker on the same café WiFi cannot see the words you type or the article you load. But encryption is not anonymity. Your ISP, and by extension state agencies, still know that you connected to akashmanew.com. They may not see which article you read, but they know you were there. For intelligence contractors, this “metadata” is more than enough. Snowden’s leaks showed us that governments didn’t need to read every email — knowing who contacted whom and when was already gold.
2. Metadata as the New Surveillance Currency
Palantir and its competitors thrive on what HTTPS leaves untouched. Connection times, device IDs, location data, purchase histories — each a puzzle piece. Alone, they may seem trivial. Together, they form a mosaic of identity, behavior, and intent. If you read an Akashma News exposé at 8:05 p.m., and your phone pinged a cell tower downtown at 8:07, and you bought a coffee at 8:12 with your debit card, the lock icon has protected nothing of real consequence. Surveillance today is not about peeking into encrypted tunnels — it’s about mapping the shadows around them.
3. Endpoints: Where Encryption Never Reaches
Even the strongest lock is useless if someone watches over your shoulder. Pegasus spyware, and countless less famous siblings, operate at this level. They infect the phone or computer itself, capturing messages before they are encrypted and after they are decrypted. Screenshots, keystrokes, microphone activations — the spyware turns the device into an open book. HTTPS cannot touch this. This is why journalists, activists, and even heads of state have fallen victim: the illusion of privacy evaporates when the compromise begins at the source.
Key Sources
Glenn Greenwald — journalist who worked directly with Snowden and Poitras on the NSA leaks.
Laura Poitras — filmmaker & journalist, co‐recipient of the Snowden documents.
Snowden’s interviews, excerpts in No Place to Hide (Greenwald’s book) and in primary Guardian/Wired/Vanity Fair reporting.
1. “Encryption in transit vs metadata visible”
Snowden said NSA was collecting vast amounts of metadata on US citizens without warrant or specific suspicion.
The Boundless Informant tool (leaked by Snowden) visualized how NSA counted metadata globally — clearly showing metadata was collected and analyzed.
2. “Device compromise (endpoints) & opsec measures Snowden/Poitas/Greenwald took”
In Wired’s “Edward Snowden: The Untold Story,” Snowden describes removing batteries from phones, being cautious about location, being aware of techniques for surveillance.
In Citizenfour (Poitas/Greenwald) and the Vanity Fair “Shadowland of Secrets” article: Snowden communicating via encrypted channels, choosing to meet in Hong Kong, using security‐aware practices.
3. “Greenwald, Poitras have full archives / media roles”
Laura Poitras is one of the initial journalists to receive Snowden’s documents, along with Greenwald. They have said they hold full archives.
The book No Place to Hide by Greenwald details many of the programs revealed and discusses the leaks based on those documents.
What Isn’t Fully Supported (Caveats)
To keep things precise and avoid overclaiming:
“No one can snoop what article they’re reading” is too strong; these sources show metadata is visible and location information can leak through endpoints or device compromise. The sources do not claim HTTPS stops state‐level mass surveillance or endpoint spying.
Snowden’s own statements acknowledge there are trade‐offs, limitations. For example, in his interviews, he said you cannot have perfect security and perfect convenience.
There is no verified public documentation (from Greenwald/Poitras/Snowden) that HTTPS alone stops all forms of surveillance (especially advanced spyware like Pegasus). These claims are inference or extrapolation based on understanding of how technology works, not direct claims in the Snowden archive.
Read the Introduction to The Illusion of Privacy Series
The Role of Independent Thinkers
Akashma Online News 