I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.
Despite a fair amount of indignation from the public, it seems to me that the majority has accepted the new surveillance reality.
Despite a fair amount of indignation from the public, it seems to me that the majority has accepted the new surveillance reality.
Privacy as an abstract concept is meaningless to most Americans -- thanks in part to pervasive data mining and targeted advertising by Google, Facebook, credit card companies, and so forth. That's not to say privacy doesn't matter to them. Children often want to keep things private from their parents. LGBT persons often want to keep their sexual orientation private from less tolerant members of society. But that's because the consequences of such a violation of privacy are immediate and visceral. In contrast, the automatic mass collection of data by the NSA doesn't have any more of a tangible impact on most people's lives than does Google's or Facebook's.
To put this another way, very few Americans have altered their behavior because of Snowden's revelations. And it's largely because the government hasn't given them any reason to. The NSA can read my e-mail, but I can safely say "Fuck the NSA" without consequence. In contrast, when I was in China, attempting to visit a prohibited website would result in my Internet connection being blocked for up to an hour. Or to pick an example in the U.S., making an illegal turn in front of a traffic camera would result in my getting a ticket. Absent that sort of "feedback" from the NSA's surveillance, the harms of mass surveillance simply don't click with a lot of people.
That's not to say such very real harms don't exist. The NSA's data collection is tied in various ways to the no-fly list, the war on drugs, and targeted assassinations, each of which result in visceral, immediate harm to real people. But from my perspective, the surveillance aspect of these stories have not been told particularly well.
There have been enough revelations to see that the NSA got to keep what it is in entirety; mission accomplished.
A global psyop; it was a show of complete dominance?
With a 'D-Notice' to effect the same in the UK and coupled with the usual soft measures - threaten to take away press passes from journalists (and their papers) - the whole lot could have been kept out of the papers.
The fact that these measures have not been used means that this was a limited hang out - or - that the Obama administration just does not know how to use the law as well as the Bush administration.
Even articles in publications like "Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press" refer to this phrase as a thing for prisoners: http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news-media-la...
So it's unclear what you're talking about.
(read: black bag jobs, rubber hose decryption, and even piscine sleep therapy)
The fact is that the Obama administration seems to have been kept out of the compartment on a number of programs; which is not surprising, but very naughty.
Most of us concerned with civil liberties feel like those sorts of court cases and issues go underreported. Start sending federal agents to reporters in order to "collect any inappropriate documents" and kill stories and things will get messy quick.
If you're the administration and you are aware of something you don't want the papers to have, you take them to court. (which is messy enough)
From Smith V. Maryland.
"If the Government were suddenly to announce on nationwide television that all homes henceforth would be subject to warrantless entry, individuals thereafter might not in fact entertain any actual expectation of privacy regarding their homes, papers, and effects."
FYI: Smith V. Maryland is the justification the FISA courts have used to argue surveillance is legal. It argues, in a nutshell, that when you route phone calls through a telecom you are forfeiting your expectation of privacy, and therefore your fourth amendment rights.
I am concerned that the surveillance industry may be trying to establish the legal precedent that because everyone knows about the surveillance, it is legal. This is a paradoxical argument: the logic would effectively be that if they told everyone they were doing it ahead of time, it would be illegal, but since they told everyone after the fact it is legal.
Now, I'm not a lawyer. This is my laymans understanding of the issue and I don't really have the body of knowledge regarding expectation of privacy to adequately discuss this. These are just the things that, as a layman, I am currently afraid of.
One specific concern I have: I wonder if members of congress feel threatened by the power of intelligence insiders to end a politician's career?