As more information becomes known about Edward Snowden and the NSA information he leaked to the Guardian, the national conversation on domestic surveillance has reached a fever pitch. Despite the recent “hair on fire” exclamations from the Right and Left alike, we should remember: the U.S. has been enacting some form of domestic surveillance as early as 1919, it was not until the Patriot Act of 2001 that the issue has been a point of concern for average Americans. Now as a country when we feel uncomfortable with our idea of privacy being eroded we are ready to blame someone for allowing things to get so severe.
I would argue that while Obama has a role in this, and the American Congress has a role in this, and the American Media has a role in this, I also believe that there’s some blame on the American people. The discussion about the Patriot Act has been happening for years and while some were upset — they marched on Washington and yelled about this being wrong — the majority of folks were not. If there’s an issue now, part of this is that the American people have to take some blame for this.
Also on today’s #TWiBRadio, we talked about a toy gun buy-back program, Chad Johnson’s courtroom shenanigans, and what happens when local conspiracy theorist and paper-wave, Alex Jones travels across the pond to show the BBC how we do crazy in the ol’ US of A.
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And this morning on #amTWiB, L.Joy, Imani, and the rest of the #TheMorningCrew delve in the predatory nature of college loan debt, four black actors take home Tony awards, and the rise of Black unemployment — it’s now at 13.5%.
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Corner Stone
I’m just going to take a wild guess here – it keeps us safe until approx Jan 2017?
Corner Stone
Oh and now some are comparing Snowden to Harry Potter…really…really.
Lord I just cannot even be bothered with some people.
Snowden ain’t nobody’s Harry Potter people.
Suffern ACE
@Corne r Stone: Come now. You miss alert level Orange for every major and minor holiday. And why is it orange today? Because it’s a holiday and the terratists would choose a holiday to get us. That’s how they roll. And when is it yellow?…well never…it’s just Orange and Orange-red for a few days after we kill a number 2, because REVENGE!
It is possible that I’d rather they collect their data in secret than attempt to scare me directly via press release every two weeks. Although I am persuadable.
Yatsuno
I am perfectly content to let this pendulum swing back to erring to the side of civil liberties. It’s just sad it’s taking this long.
AdamK
Sick of story. Seek of seeing “Snowdon.” Snowdon, Snowdon, Snowdon. No new information, just half-informed opinion. Bleh. Make it stop.
Comrade Jake
People will ocasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time they will pick themselves up and continue on.
Yatsuno
@Suffern ACE: Sigh. Nobody has any respect for magenta. Or puce for that matter.
(I just had to add puce to my phone’s dictionary. That is just sad.)
AdamK
Did you know that the Supreme Court came out with a ruling today about whether you have to give the government some of your raisins? That really happened.
Corner Stone
@AdamK: Are you ready to read a little bit about “Snowden” ?
ranchandsyrup
What Yatsuno said. Surveillance may or may not keep us safe but it makes some people feel like they are safe.
Corner Stone
@AdamK: regular crappy raisins or the awesome golden raisins?
Corner Stone
@Suffern ACE: What do you have against orange? Not a good match for your skin tone?
Omnes Omnibus
@AdamK: I don’t have any raisins. I do have some craisins though. Just ate a handful since you made me think of them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I saw one poll that showed 53% approval of this program, another (Pew) with 62% in favor. I think the exposure is a good thing, and I even applaud Half-Baked Rand’s announcement to sue over it, but I’m not expecting anything from the Roberts court, especially in light of the recent DNA ruling.
Chris Hayes is about to feature a debate on this. I hope he gives it more than one segment.
Since this program is legal, does Snowdon have any protection from whistle blower protection laws?
Spaghetti Lee
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If those numbers are reasonably accurate in terms of what the public at large thinks about PRISM, then I don’t know why so many people are saying the debate is already over, privacy is dead, nobody cares, etc. 62% is not an unimpeachable majority, and 53% sure as hell isn’t.
Yatsuno
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Waitaminute…what the hell is Senator Aqua Buddha going to base his suit on? Or do I even want to know?
Comrade Jake
@Spaghetti Lee: but who are they gonna vote out of office over it?
The real question is who is pissed off enough to call their Senator.
Baud
@Yatsuno:
FREEDOM! The suit is based on FREEDOM.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Spaghetti Lee: There’s nothing I see in these numbers to suggest intensity on one side or the other, but this
…does not give me hope for a popular groundswell against it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Yatsuno: IANAL, but this does not inspire confidence:
Could he, as a Verizon or Facebook client, a google user, claim standing (I think I’m using that right) to sue the gov’t simply for having collected that data? and doesn’t he have to work his way up to the USSC? through the appellate process?
mai naem
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Doesn’t the retroactive immunity for the telecoms from 05/07 whenever it was, take care of this issue?
Anyhow, seeing the clip of Snowden on Chris Hayes finally made me figure out who he reminds me of —- Ezra Klein. Add a beard on and change his hair parting and Ezra could play Snowden. Also too, when I heard the name Snowden my first thought was the Brit Royal Family, Elizabeth’s sister Margaret was married to a Snowdon but I believe his name was spelled Snowdon.
spacewalrus
This discussion can’t even be had without bringing up how Americans have allowed their privacy rights to be trampled on in the name of technology and consumerism. Codifying that into the law is easy when people have allowed the egregious collation of such data by private entities.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
No and yes.
4tehlulz
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Man, if only there were a way for Senator Paul to introduce legislation changing the law…..
eric
This all part of Obama’s plan to come out in favor of the government data mining, just to have the GOP reflexively pass a constitutional amendment barring the practice in perpetuity.
11 dimensional chess bitches!
eric
@4tehlulz: sadly, being the very junior and crazy senator from kentucky, he does not have the keys to the legislative car yet.
Yatsuno
@4tehlulz: What are you some kind of hippie pinko Commie? That’s crazy talk right there!
Heliopause
The American People are extremely susceptible to propaganda. The American People weren’t clamoring for an invasion of Iraq until they were convinced of its necessity. They weren’t in favor of LGBT rights until political leadership and popular culture told them it was OK. They weren’t drafting a little-known senator from Illinois to be President until his PR machine really got rolling. And they won’t get concerned about civil liberties until they’re allowed to consider the issue (which the dominant culture has forbidden them to do for the last dozen years) for a little while.
MomSense
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
And it would take a massively popular groundswell but there has been almost no serious organizing against the Patriot Act or calling for changes to FISA for more than 10 years now. It is much easier to point and yell at President Obama on any number of issues than it is to do the hard work of building a committed movement that will work to get Congress to change the laws.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@4tehlulz: I doubt that bill would get much beyond a Paul-Sanders filibuster, with maybe Ted Cruz joining in.
ETA: I forgot about Wyden, Udall and Merkley. I still don’t see a lot of support
Comrade Jake
I wonder how many votes an all-out repeal of the Patriot Act would receive in the Senate.
eric
@Heliopause: so, they dont get blame at all for failing to ask questions? not a bit? not ever? There is an inertia caused by the demands of every day life, but at some point when it comes to the really big ticket items of war in the middle east, you dont get to simply blame the propagandists. Many people wanted the war, albeit for different reasons.
Yatsuno
@Comrade Jake: Five. Maybe. If I go upstairs and yell at Patty and Maria for about three hours.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Wingnut Senator Al Franken says that these programs do not spy on the American people and there are things that he is privvy to that everyone else, especially the bad guys, should not know.
When you’ve lost Al Franken…
Elie
We have a lot of contradictory needs and wants to reconcile, so I don’t expect we will get anything resembling “discussion” for a while. I hear hysterical screaming about individual privacy and the horror of the “govmint” knowing anything about ME, juxtaposed to fears (including mine), that the means for actually knowing the right information is lagging way behind the government just accumulating it. Then we have the corporate sector, which if anything is much more intensely collecting information about each of us and quite effectively Using It to drive markets and sales. I see my own friends and associates publishing and pushing out their own information on Instagram and facebook and other apps but some of you same people want PRIVACY. That said, we have an international and global reality that can have some kook possibly be able to use cybertechnology to change the direction of baffles in a hot lab somewhere, releasing some horrible bug upon us.
It.Is.Very.Complex. In every direction. I will not have some glibertarian moron define his/her own narcissistic world view as the only consideration. Nope. They have to line up with the rest of us and assert developing safeguards for all of us in web of complex needs and desires — intersecting and at times conflicting — but all important.
ruemara
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Al Franken is worse than Bush! He sold us out! You know, it’s working in or alongside government. It really does open your eyes to certain things.
Davis X. Machina
@Comrade Jake: 12-14. Tops.
Elie
@Heliopause:
Its called “change” bro. I don’t think the American people or any people as a group, have any way of knowing the possibility of every change right away. Folks have to see and understand and then they can push the change from their own realities and persectives. THAT is what a representative democracy is about. People have to be exposed, then learn, then think about it before they accept change. Not at YOUR pace, or MY pace, but each individually until you have a tipping point. That is what democracy is about. Maybe YOU should respect it more. People are not stupid. They are living their lives. Activists and influencers have to know that, reach out and do what needs to be done. That has happened pretty frequently in recent years and we have the successes of gay rights and the passage of healthcare reform to point to. Well, whoa, not everyone marches in lock step with your opinions on things? Do the work and then you can complain. Sitting at your keyboard bitching about the “stupids” out there is NOT the work. dig?
Suffern ACE
@mai naem: I think he looks like Peter Berg from his Chicago Hope days. Actually if Peter Berg and Nate Silver had a baby…
Odie Hugh Manatee
@ruemara:
Stuart Smalley has been assimilated by The Borg!
Comrade Jake
@Davis X. Machina: I’d say under 10.
Baud
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
We are good enough, we are smart enough, we are Borg. Resistance is futile.
ruemara
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Rather like that, except with ugly nuanced facts, instead of a skin irritation and ugly head hardware.
Comrade Jake
@Elie: We stand at a crossroads. One path leads to despair, the other to destruction. Let’s hope we make the right choice!
Mandalay
This is the wrong question to be asking. The government should be asking how it can make its citizens safer.
From that perspective this graphic is pretty damning in showing that deaths from terrorism are trivial when compared to gun deaths.
– Deaths in America since 1999 from terrorism: ~3,000
– Deaths in America since 1999 from guns: ~364,000
The government’s solutions:
– Do absolutely nothing about gun deaths.
– Increase spending on homeland security, and increase government surveillance.
If you made this stuff up nobody would believe it.
rda909
@ruemara: No kidding! And more selling out us “liberals” here by Obummergoldmansachstorturelovingguantanamoamera!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11107739
President Kucinich would’ve reduced those troop levels from 140K to nearly zero in 6 months, instead of the approx 3 years it took Ofailure! What a Military Industrial Complex stooge Ogeithner is, huh?!?
And don’t even get me started on how he changed the Bush policy of surveillance without warrants, to running things through the FISA court instead! How dare the torturer-in-chief do such a thing!
ChrisNYC
I think we can’t get to the “keep us safe” question because we never even had a discussion of the is there a threat and what is it question. Our not getting to that threshold question I blame partly/mostly on liberals. But, ultimately we can’t get to the “is there a threat” and “what is it” question because that’s where the really heavy hitters play. And we’re really locked out of that whole conversation. The stakes are too high for too many entities and they’re not fucking around with pissant popular opinion.
Unlike lots of people here, I don’t think Americans are cowering or ever really were. I think that trope took fire on the internet because it’s sort of masturbatory and self-congratulating. “Look at all the fools/dolts/others (uh, I mean my fellow citizens) who are so scared.” Same with “security theatre” — there is just some hipster/fake cynical/in the know cred to that phrase that is like catnip. Anyway, I have never encountered anyone, from people I know well to people who are acquaintances who ever once expressed in words or otherwise fear of a present fear of a coming terrorist attack. Never. I was here on Columbus Day in 2001 and people weren’t scared. They were tired and sad and subdued.
Comrade Jake
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Franken sounds like he’s talking to third graders in that quote.
Wait a minute…
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Baud:
LOL!
@ruemara:
It almost sounds fashionable. :)
Elie
@Comrade Jake:
Part of me says “Amen” and agrees with you, but the other part feels more hopeful. Yes, this is a shitstorm — but we are “aerating” this stuff way more than has been done in years and I feel hopeful about that — at least right this minute…
In nursing, a lot of times, when you remove the scab, you see a lot of pus and stink and cleaning it out is painful and sometimes the person gets sicker for a while, before they get better..
I like our chances better having exposed the weakness and rot then not having done that — don’t you?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Comrade Jake:
Now that’s optimism!
@Comrade Jake:
Exactly. :)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rda909: The WaPo article I linked to above compares Dem/Rep approval of spying, and only mentions in passing the small matter of warrants, no mention of the difference between “wiretapping” and “data gathering”. It’s all about partisanship.
@ChrisNYC: I suspect the frightened vote more, especially in mid-terms. Remember the woman who called “authorities” because she overheard some men speaking Arabic in an airport gate. She said “all I could think of was 9/11 and my little family”. And it’s not just the frightened. Getting Tough and Serious about Terrorism gives all kinds of racists an emotional outlet and a machismo stiffie.
Mandalay
@ChrisNYC:
Nor me, but it is instructive to consider who benefits from the perception that citizens are afraid:
– The media. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. (Juan Williams can tell us how he is worried and nervous when he sees Muslims on a plane to successfully instigate a media shitstorm.)
– The government and the Administration, who want to be able to assert their power by claiming to protect us. They really want their citizenry to need them, and perceive them as their guardians and protectors.
MomSense
@Heliopause:
Ironically one of the people who was persuaded about Iraq was Greenwald.
SiubhanDuinne
@AdamK:
They looked like chocolate chip cookies.
They turned out to be raisin cookies.
Is it any wonder I have trust issues?
Davis X. Machina
@ChrisNYC:
Out in here among the pine trees of Real America, in the fall of 2001, I was told, inter alia, that the Muslims were going to truck-bomb the food court at the mall, our reservoirs were all going to be poisoned, and if Al Gore had somehow made it into the White House, he would have surrendered to the terrorists, all women would have to wear burqas, and it would be illegal to be Christian.
People really did lose their shit. Not everyone, and maybe just the loudest and most annoying ones, but a lot of them. A lot of them haven’t got their shit back. And their take on the Bill of Rights is enough to keep one up at night.
Some of it is cowering. But some of it is wanting their petty-in-the-strict-sense lives of getting and gaining and growing old to mean something. It’s their shot at a Spitfire Summer.
The events of 9/11, and the wars that followed — and this is a reason why we as a country were so ready to conflate them — gave people a chance, and pretty much a cost-free one, too, to belong to a Great Crusade, and take part in a Manichaean struggle with Ultimate Darkness. Which beats the pants off métro, boulot, dodo.
MomSense
@Comrade Jake:
Udall and Wyden.
The Randster–well this is a big maybe. He could very well talk about it for a day and then decide he’s cool with it.
Two
Heliopause
@eric:
@Elie:
Interesting that both of you badly misread the plain words I wrote but from entirely different perspectives, one saying that I held “the American People” entirely blameless, the other complaining that I blamed them at all. Funny.
Public opinion will gradually shift back toward a greater regard for civil liberties IF the issue is kept in front of them. If not it will continue to be whatever the public opinion pollster decides to query them about.
Elie
@Davis X. Machina:
I hear you and agree — but what to do with that information and knowledge?
Elie
@Heliopause:
Ok —
I have to laugh that two of us disagree from two different directions. You must be doing something right!
Its just tough right now. We must be patient with each other and take the time to clarify and try to get our communication right.
I want to do that.
Thanks for not getting angry
Eric
@eric: @Heliopause: I dont disagree that the propoganda machine is powerful but sadly sometimes the sheep really like and trust the wolf cause all the other sheep are pacifists. :)
Ben Cisco
Snowden might be 100% correct in all his pronouncements.
Also, I might wake up tomorrow with wheels where my legs used to be, thus being transformed into an ice cream truck.
The odds of either of the two statements proving to be true I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Anne Laurie
@Eric:
A lot of people who don’t remember anything before the Reagan Administration think that only right-wingers can be authoritarians. One thing about have actual Marxists still running loose, they made it clear that neither end of that particular political axis is immune to “Four legs good, two legs better!” sloganeering…
JoyfulA
I was freaked out by surveillance in the mid-60s, when I was in college and a relative with a DoD job begged me not to get in any demonstrations. I was told every crowd was infiltrated, pictures were being taken, and coworkers had their security clearances lifted and were fired for having subversive, un-American family members.
Corner Stone
@Ben Cisco: The odds of Snowden being right/accurate v your stupid fucking wheels on the bus analogy….hmmm…which odds should I take?
Eric
@Anne Laurie: This was the core of the dispute between sartre and my intellectual idol, albert camus. Ideology is spiritual imperialism.
Corner Stone
@JoyfulA:
That’s pretty much bullshit. You’ve been scared for 50+ years?
El Cid
“Does Surveillance Keep Us Safe?”
Some does, some doesn’t. Traditionally the nation-state machinery is most interested in that which may happen to do so but which mainly involves nation-state objectives.
JoyfulA
@Corner Stone: No. And I wasn’t scared then. But I was freaked out.
Keith G
@JoyfulA: Folks tend to forget that for most Americans the 60’s were not about openness, protests, and push back against authority.
mclaren
Surveillance keeps us safe from democracy.
Marmot
“it was not until the Patriot Act of 2001 that the issue has been a point of concern for average Americans.”
Jeezus. And Clinton never had to face a series of politically motivated, cooked-up scandals. Amirite?
Paul in KY
@Corner Stone: Who would have got Larva-Darvaed (or whatever that was) by Voldemort on about page 250 of 2nd book, if Hermiome hadn’t bailed his lucky ass out (time after time after time).