The movement to undermine US freedom and privacy has been focussed and well-funded since 9/11, under both Bush and Obama and involving more than just the NSA. If it's the work of idiots, they are very hard-working, successful idiots as they've managed to wrest considerable power from a nation of hundreds of millions, assuming control of the world's foremost superpower.
The movement to undermine US freedom and privacy has been focussed and well-funded since 9/11, under both Bush and Obama and involving more than just the NSA.
If that's true, then why don't they just, you know, end privacy? Tptacek was right when he said:
Obama could give a speech in the Rose Garden this week carefully explaining that NSA requires access to American communications, all of them, in order to defend the country against terrorist attacks, and that while privacy is "important", the expectation of perfect privacy in your cell phone and Internet communications isn't reasonable because it helps terrorist cells without providing much benefit.
I would recoil from such a speech, but the public probably would not.
The American public currently has a weak expectation of privacy in their electronic communications. But they make virtually no meaningful demand for that privacy. Thwarting terror attacks are a much higher priority to them. Want evidence of that? Well, the body-conscious, vain, generally out-of-shape American public routinely submits to electronic strip searches to get onto airplanes. You think they care if someone's screening their calls to catch Abu Shahid?
They would accept that argument. And with that acceptance, the expectations of privacy and the notion of what "reasonable" searches are would be, in short order, redefined --- those rights being explicitly predicated on contemporary mores by the Constitution.
When I look at it from this angle, it becomes apparent that while privacy is inconvenient to the USG, and something they feel they have to work around, it's not something they're intent on eliminating. Despite the rhetoric from the tech punditry, the USG has not stated that it's reasonable for them to surveil US citizens; their defense has instead been that they are not surveilling them. I too think that's a falsehood, but it's truth or falsity is not the only thing that matters about it.
>If that's true, then why don't they just, you know, end privacy?
By covertly erecting systems that end privacy (and attacking privacy tools like Tor), they are, in effect, ending privacy (without hurting the "US is a champion of freedom" brand to the same degree that explicitly ending privacy would do).
This is a surprise. I've never been fingerprinted at a US port. Perhaps it's because I have a biometric passport. Still, such a practice can't be universal.
> The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion.
