Panopticon of global surveillance

[Peter Lemkin]

When Luke Harding's story appeared in the Guardian about the paragraphs of his story on Snowden being deleted before his very eyes, a number of people commented that what he witnessed was exactly what happens when the delete key on your keyboard gets stuck. The keyboard beeps, flashes and text gets gobbled up by a keyboard that spookily no longer responds to the owner's commands. If he had been writing an article about Snowdon the mountain in Wales and this happened his first instinct would have been there was a hardware fault. But because he was writing about Edward Snowden his first thought was that the Spooks had taken over his computer. Maybe they had. Or maybe he had a piece of cheese stuck under the delete key. Sometimes it pays to consider alternative explanations.

This is a ludicrous way to look at this, IMHO. First of all, while I have had stuck keys on my keyboard they always MUST start from the cursor [on the right] not on the left! Second, this happened several times and to a professional journalist [and typist]. Third, when you consider who it was he was writing about - along with the other events he mentioned I totally disagree that alternative explanations need to be explored - unless one is straining to dismiss what Snowden has said and what the NSA and its ilk are like. I personally have had trojens sent into my computer to delete specific files and those files only! I can prove it was not a computer problem. I have heard of others having other such problems. They can control one's computer - they can add and they can erase - usually they just spy on what is in it and what one is typing with keylogging. I say the burden of guilt and suspicion is NOT on a sticky keyboard, but on the security [sic] services that spy on anyone who works on things they don't like [such as the truth!].