It has definitely been the major news of the last few days. PRISM is the acronym that names the top-secret program allegedly used by the National Security Agency to extract personal information of users of services like Google, Microsoft or Facebook. We are talking about emails, documents, chats, photographs, videos and connection logs, all of this now in the hands of the NSA.
The story was revealed by the newspaper The Guardian, which had access to a top secret document. The authenticity of the 41-slide PowerPoint presentation was proven, as the document claimed that PRISM was running with the assistance of the companies since 2007. However, the newspaper requested comments from these major institutions and got a surprising answer: they all denied knowledge of such a program.
But the worst is that PRISM is now threatening to end Bitcoin users’ anonymity, as Dropbox was listed as the company that would come on board with the program. As you know, although a lot of experts advise caution with this option, Bitcoin data can be saved in your Dropbox account. Maybe this won’t happen anymore…
As the news spread, a lot of users started complaining online and saying they are changing and abandoning Dropbox right away. Of course, there are differences between using Dropbox as a normal user and, for instance, being able to pay for the service with Bitcoins (which isn’t possible yet) and keeping your data on the cloud. And, then, some other users suggested this solution: using Dropbox anyway by adding a layer of encryption on their own.
Anyway, the possible marriage between PRISM and Dropbox can give a push to companies such as BitTorrent Sync, based on the BitTorrent protocol, and Mega, launched in January by the well-known Kim Dotcom. However, it’s still too soon to make forecasts.
