Jennifer Lawrence, NSA and Your Information.

The internet is ablaze with stories of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities having photographs released to the digital world via hacking into multiple iCloud accounts.

In July Edward Snowden, former NSA contractor, released information that implicates the US's National Security Agency (NSA) in the collection, and inter-agency distribution of photos of American Citizens. These photos are of the same nature as these celebrities and should be taken just as seriously. But it seems as fast as this story by Snowden broke, it fizzled away almost unnoticed. What is the major difference here?

Can it be that the images of these very few celebrities have been given a higher value than that of every other person taking these types of photos? Absolutely. Whenever a person places an individual value on something it becomes a product of acquisition for others searching for their own valuable item, in this case money or notoriety. Can it be that the very nature of why they were "stolen" in the first place; the celebs being for mere entertainment and carnal value and the other for what the vast majority of Americans claim as "National Security"? Whenever people place a greater value on the very few of any given grouping of people a classification is born and in that some sort of exclusions can be placed into those classifications. In this case it is excusable for some that the NSA, because of its task at "security" can collect this information at all. While it then becomes unexcusable for a private person to do the same to a select group of others who are seen as more valuable than the whole of the population, based on the idea that these celebrities have a right to privacy. What is missed here is that the right to privacy is an inherent right to all people, not just celebrities. That right has been violated repeatedly and it has been reported and brought to light repeatedly, though not much in the way of protest happens.

One thing to remember also in this is the level of security to be expected from a public information cloud. Celebrities and everyone else would do well to understand how these things work and the level of risk they place themselves in whenever they join or publish to these services. Google+, iCloud and other cloud services should be better prepared for the inevitable breaches and security risks they will encounter.

While Apple is taking into their own investigation of how these breaches were made and to track down those that did it, it is almost laughable that anyone really cares at all.