I wonder if donating to wikileaks or even sending an email to wikileaks offering to volunteer would be enough to interest someone in government in getting all your 1's & 0's.
I wasn't trying to sound paranoid or cowardly. I was just curious what opinions people had on the level of involvement with Wikileaks that would be enough to get the governments attention.
I don't think it would take very much "involvement" at all.
Let's say you sent such an e-mail. It was noticed by the NSA and triggered... whatever and now they've decided that they want to monitor you. How much difficulty is involved?
From what I've read recently, it seems that it's fairly trivial to start monitoring an individual and continue to do so for a period of time. I would imagine that the easier it is, the higher the chances are of it happening.
If it's a matter of hitting a few keystrokes to begin the monitoring, there's little cost involved so why not? They could monitor you for a while, analyze the data, and then decide if they need to keep monitoring you.
If it's extremely difficult, costly, or time-consuming to begin the process, well, I'd imagine they would be less likely to do so (by how much I won't begin to guess).
Basically, if they can start monitoring you and gathering data on you with little effort or cost required, it's probably a given that they would keep an eye on you. If there's a bunch of paperwork, warrants, etc., involved, the chances would be lower, I think.
It's hard to imagine anything more interesting to the NSA, but for not just the obvious reason.
Wikileaks set itself up as a nexus of exchange for state secrets of a great many states. Any state with an intelligence operation would want to penetrate that organization to have access to raw data and advance notice of anything interesting about to go down.
I've often wondered if such organizations (not naming names) ever wondered why they get approximately one volunteer from each European nation.
I think you are right as there are ways to mitigate natural disasters. The question is whether or not there is political will to pay for the mitigation measures until the disaster happens. Winnipeg had been flooded severely several times in the last hundred years until the 1970s when a giant floodway was created which could divert a river's worth of water around the city. Since then the floodway has saved the city from numerous large floods and has just recently been expanded to provide protection for a 1 in 700 year flood.
It seems unfortunate the city was catastrophically flooded several times before that monetary expenditure was politically acceptable.
