Opposition to NSA spying programs starting to build


Despite the massive efforts by the administration and leading members of Congress and elements of the servile establishment media to downplay the NSA spying revelations and attack those who brought them to light, opposition and anger about the programs is starting to build.

The Guardian reports that Europeans are angry that their privacy is valued even less than that of Americans and Obama is expected to face some expressions of concern when he goes to the G-8 meeting in Northern Ireland. But of course, nothing will come of it since all these national leaders are in the same club.

The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is under fire with increasing calls for his resignation for flat-out lying. But president Obama is at the moment standing by him because his lies were in the service of Obama but he may have to ditch him because of his incompetence as a liar.

Greenwald provides a quick round-up of the reverberations in the US and around the world triggered by the whistle blowing revelations as other countries come under pressure from their own people to answer to it is that the American government has even greater access to their private information.

The fallout is not confined to the US. It is global. Reuters this week reported that “German outrage over a US Internet spying program has broken out ahead of a visit by Barack Obama, with ministers demanding the president provide a full explanation when he lands in Berlin next week and one official likening the tactics to those of the East German Stasi.”

Indeed, Viviane Reding, the EU’s justice commissioner, has, in the words of the New York Times, “demanded in unusually sharp terms that the United States reveal what its intelligence is doing with personal information of Europeans gathered under the Prism surveillance program revealed last week”. She is particularly insistent that EU citizens be given some way to find out whether their communications were intercepted by the NSA.

In the wake of the Guardian’s articles, I heard from journalists and even government officials from around the world interested in learning the extent of the NSA’s secret spying on the communications of their citizens. These stories have resonated globally, and will continue to do so, because the NSA’s spying apparatus is designed to target the shared instruments used by human beings around the world to communicate with one another.

This is not going away.

Comments

  1. machintelligence says

    Even more worrying than the extent of the data gathering is the potential for the security agencies to seamlessly implant false information and then “discover” it. How can you even defend yourself against such activities?

  2. Pierce R. Butler says

    All this fussing comes from civil libertarians and other mere commoners, so probably will be allowed to flourish for a few days and then go into the memory hole as soon as another Hollywood starlet or pro jock gets pulled over for drunk driving.

    However, another social sector must be considered. The next time, say, Goldman Sachs wants to pull off some scam and needs the collaboration of, oh, UBS, in ways requiring more detailed coordination than sending executive VPs Learjetting across the Atlantic with sleek locked briefcases, how are they going to communicate securely?

    Won’t somebody please think of the one percent!?!

  3. left0ver1under says

    This is not going away.

    While I would like you to be right and this means the end of the surveillance (police) state, I’m not as hopeful.

    Occupy Wall Street isn’t what it was two years ago, and the police state response to that was twofold:
    (1) Propaganda against its leaders
    (2) Violence against those who stood up.

    #1 has already happened to Wikileaks, Greenwald, Manning and Snowdon. There are plenty of thugs willing to do #2.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *