Another threat to Americans' information emerges By Antonio Alvarado

Right when you thought your privacy online couldn't get any less private, the “Heartbleed bug” proves yet again that your personal information is not safe. On April 7, it was announced that a security flaw in a popularly used encryption standard gives hackers access to massive amounts of personal data from services like Gmail or YouTube. Heartbleed is a flaw in the open-source encryption standard used by most websites we have come to know and love.

Nothing on the Internet is sacred anymore. Now internet hackers around the world know what we could be typing privately via email -- just when we were getting used to Obama knowing about it!

The struggle over privacy on the Internet might just be the defining issue of the current generation. People with the right know-how, like with the “Heartbleed bug,” will be able to easily leverage this knowledge over anyone else on the Internet to get at the real online goldmine: data. Knowledge has always been power, regardless of its form.

We hear scary things about the Internet all the time: so what makes this specific security breach so bad? According to Kyle Russell of Business insider “It’s really bad. Web servers can keep a lot of information in their active memory, including usernames, passwords, and even the content that users have uploaded to a service.” Anyone reading this article is very likely to have been affected by it.

People need to understand that although you may have “nothing to hide,” it is STILL important to stand up for privacy online or offline. If privacy was always subordinate to security, there would be no need for laws to require a warrant to search someone’s home. Some may ask, “Why not just let the police search if they have nothing to hide?” I would much rather live in a free society where people are not constantly being watched than a safer, slave society of guilty until proven innocent.

This bug is an illegal tool used to undermine privacy for the sake of personal gain. The reason I call privacy and the state of privacy into question is because this bug has been USED by government in order to gain data on us. The big plot twist at the end folks, is that the hacker was government and government was hacker. The data mining going on is totally out of control. The sad truth is that Republicans and Democrats are both power parties. The Republicans will moan and detest the Democrats for their use of this perverse data mining, but when they take back power (hopefully in the distant future) they will forget all about this problem.

We as a society need to understand that times have changed. Traditional currency no longer rules the realm; the new currency is knowledge and data. Whoever controls the data controls us. We cannot expect government or hackers to willingly give up this power. The only foreseeable solution is to not only strengthen security by fixing the bug, but also to fix the bigger problem and change the way we see ourselves online.

The Internet is not just a place we go to see pictures of cats; it is an extension of ourselves. And if we don’t protect it, no one will.