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Access

It is an interesting time in the realm of access, especially in the booming age of social media. With everything happening involving Edward Snowden and access and information, the whole scope of access changed for me. In our book, Tedfrod and Herbeck refer to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and how it's basic policy is to "encourage disclosure, not secrecy". Predictably, many large corporations fight back against this act and find any loophole they can to avoid the release of public records. Which makes me think the corporations are hiding more from us then we may think, otherwise, why fight it? My question is, if we already know that the government has tons of surveillance, aren't they surveilling these corporations too? So if these companies are up to shady things, shouldn't our government already be on top of these things?
Last week a story broke about a widely known transportation company, Uber. Uber was hacked in October of 2016 and in the hack, 57 million peoples personal information was seized. This cyber hack was not released until Tuesday, when it was uncovered that Uber paid the hacker group responsible for the attack $100,000 not to release the information or anything about the hack. This kind of situation is incredibly scary to me, because who knows how many other companies have ran into situations like this. These businesses have our information, and they are all at risk of being attacked by hacking groups, which essentially makes us vulnerable to a cyber attack as well. If they are being hacked and people are getting our information, we deserve to know about it. Whether it be from the corporations themselves or the government.

Peterson, Becky. “Uber Reportedly Paid Hackers $100,000 to Cover up a Cyberattack That Exposed the Personal Data of 57 Million People.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 21 Nov. 2017, www.businessinsider.com/uber-paid-hackers-to-cover-up-cyber-attack-affecting-57-million-people-report-2017-11.

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