The Senate Kills Surveillance Reform and Glenn Greenwald Shrugs
The Senate yesterday buried—at least for now—surveillance reform, when Republican senators refused to allow the current draft of the measure to proceed to a vote. Glenn Greenwald has an interesting reaction to the legislative death of the grandiosely-named USA Freedom Act: It doesn’t matter. He writes, “it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally.” Change, rather, is going to come from elsewhere: from the posture of the technology companies, from individual use of encryption, from policy decisions of countries other than the United States, and from court proceedings:
I find this argument a little perplexing coming from the man who considered the NSA’s bulk metadata program to be so important and so alarming that it was the very first program he broke in all of the documents Edward Snowden gave him.
Metadata can’t really be encrypted; it’s the information used to deliver content and thus has to be readable, after all. And the law as currently interpreted permits NSA to collect it in bulk. If one thinks this activity is offensive and important, one should not be too dismissive of legislative action to curtail it. Yet Greenwald suddenly does not sound quite so alarmed by the possibility that NSA would retain the authority to bulk collect metadata:
There is a real question about whether the defeat of this bill is good, bad, or irrelevant. To begin with, it sought to change only one small sliver of NSA mass surveillance (domestic bulk collection of phone records under section 215 of the Patriot Act) while leaving completely unchanged the primary means of NSA mass surveillance, which takes place under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, based on the lovely and quintessentially American theory that all that matters are the privacy rights of Americans (and not the 95% of the planet called “non-Americans”).
Huh. There’s a lot in this short passage to unpack, but focus for now just on Greenwald’s contemplation of the possibility that killing the USA Freedom Act might be a “good” thing and his dismissal of the metadata program as merely a “small sliver” of NSA mass surveillance. He even goes so far as to dismiss the end of bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 as no more than “mildly positive.” I don’t recall his reaction to the underlying program, at the time he revealed it, as only that bulk telephony metadata collection was mildly negative. I recall a slightly more breathless, outraged response. So what then are we to make of his now-casual dismissal of a bill to curtail the program—much less the entire reform mechanism, which is to say legislation, that would enable that curtailing? How can bulk metadata collection be an intolerable outrage and ending the 215 program be merely “mildly positive” or even a net negative?
One possibility is that Greenwald doesn’t know how to take yes for an answer. He is outraged by bulk metadata collection. Congress contemplates ending bulk metadata collection. So it suddenly fades in his mind in importance relative to outrages Congress is not addressing.
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/11/the-senate-kills-surveillance-reform-and-glenn-greenwald-shrugs/
If you people don't want to believe me, or want to say I'm just too blinded by my Greenwald hatred, Wittes makes my case for me...
Or will you try to say now that Wittes of all people is some paid Pentagon authoritarian shill??
= new reply since forum marked as read
