One of the features of the Sputnik 3 laptop I'm using these days that no doubt contributes to its impressive battery life is peripherals that can power down substantially when not in use. This capability, coupled with the general disdain for freedom and privacy that has dominated public policy in the US (and a substantial part of the rest of the Western world) since 2001, has been making me suspicious lately.
You see, when the sound card in this laptop powers up, something (probably a change in DC bias in the amplifier circuitry, but I don't know) causes the speakers to emit a quiet pop. Often the proximate cause for this is obvious; starting a media player, adjusting sound levels in the mixer, playing a video on Hulu, etc. Sometimes, however, it is not.
Along the lines of my desire to jail Skype, I try to sandbox my web browsing. I disable most plugins entirely, require positive confirmation for the remainder to load, use different browsing profiles for different authentication domains (e.g., Google+, Facebook) and different activities (work, personal), disable most prediction and tracking features, and generally try to keep things tame. That said, at the end of the day, I kind of have to trust my browser to do its part. I use Google Chrome (which I realize has some nontrivial degree of irony, given the foregoing; maybe I'll write more about that later), which is of course not open source — that means I can't even verify entirely what it claims to be doing or even should be doing. Not that one can realistically do so with an open source browser, either, as large as they are, and particularly when installed as a binary package.
Of course, with the continued adoption of HTML5, more and more complex functionality is available directly to web pages without the involvement of plugins. This includes a fair amount of multimedia capability. Even then, the browser is supposed to ask before it allows access to anything but simple playback (and maybe for that, too).
Therefore, when I'm poking around the web for whatever purpose, and I hear that little pop sound, and I don't see any little speaker icons in the Chrome tab bar or hear any audio, I get a little bit concerned. If nothing is playing, why did the sound system power up? Maybe something just opened the output device, but maybe the browser isn't doing its job and the data is going in the other direction! This happens with some frequency — certainly several times a week, and possibly several times a day. It's hard to pinpoint the frequency with much accuracy, since virtually any ambient noise will mask the sound.
This sort of thing is the real damage of invasive anti-terrorism policies. Some have recently been saying it's the damage done by Snowden, or Wikileaks, or some other agitator, but the fact of the matter is that those people didn't create the problems, they just publicized them. Keeping us safe and keeping us afraid don't have to be the same thing, and I really shouldn't have to worry if it's Big Brother when my computer makes a funny sound.
A couple of years ago, had I expressed such sentiments, I would have been accused of becoming a tin foil hat wearer. Today it's tough to levy that accusation. That can probably be laid at the feet of Snowden et al.