Have the champions of the NSA/Obama, and the detractors of Snowden apologized yet?

[Pholus]

26. Naw. The news cycle changed, and "we all know it now so just deal" is the meme.

So it isn't a story anymore. Except that it just keeps drip, drip, dripping. I look back on June last year and realize that even my worst case at the time did not grasping the full extent of how the securocrats have really destroyed the concept of free expression. That grade-school threat came to pass - we now all have permanent records.

Remember how this all extralegal stuff was essential because it was keeping us safe from "terra?" Yeah, then it came out that the DEA was getting access and then phonying up the investigation to "protect classified sources." I naively thought that people would be outraged when the "rule of law" was basically being destroyed to increase the prosecution rate. Wrong. Just last month I ended up exchanging with a poster who was simply overjoyed to think that law enforcement might be tapping his neighbors about domestic law enforcement issues. Because he didn't want to have to actually, you know, interact with them enough to get to know them -- why not outsource that to some corporate mercenary in a Virginia suburb, right?

Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com/) posted a link to a talk by Dan Geer this week on the "Government Surveillance Mentality." It's a good read and I highly recommend it: http://geer.tinho.net/geer.uncc.9x13.txt

So many good bits that it's hard to just pick the three best (the bolding is my addition):

We have known for some time that traffic analysis is more powerful
than content analysis. If I know everything about to whom you
communicate including when, where, with what inter-message latency
and at what length, then I know you. If all I have is the undated,
unaddressed text of your messages, then I am an archaeologist, not
a case officer. The soothing mendacity of proxies for the President
saying "It's only metadata" relies on the ignorance of the listener.

We all know the truism, that knowledge is power. We all know that
there is a subtle yet important distinction between information and
knowledge. We all know that a negative declaration like "X did not
happen" can only proven true if you have the enumeration of
*everything* that did happen and can show that X is not in it. We
all know that when a President says "Never again" he is asking for
the kind of outcome for which proving a negative, lots of negatives,
is categorically essential. Proving a negative requires omniscience.
Omniscience requires god-like powers.

Standoff biometry by itself terminates the argument over whether
security and privacy are a zero sum game -- the sum is nowhere near
that good, and it is the surveilled who are capitalizing the system.
As with my game, entirely innocuous things become problematic when
surveilled. Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School Emerita,
called this "anticipatory conformity" and said:

[W]e anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with
awareness. We know, for example, when we're going through the
security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists
or we'll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking
a joke. It's within our awareness to self-censor. And that
self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom. We
self-censor not only to follow the rules, but also to avoid the
shame of being publicly singled out. Once anticipatory conformity
becomes second nature, it becomes progressively easier for people
to adapt to new impositions on their privacy, their freedoms.
The habit has been set.[/div]