NSA Phone Record Collecting and the Melancholy of Living in the Future (Updated):

[warrior1]

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/

snip

The real significance of the court order that Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Spencer Ackerman reported on in The Guardian isn't that it reveals that the National Security Agency was getting millions of telephone records from Verizon in a fishing expedition for terrorists, maybe hackers, who knows. If you didn't think that that was going on, you're fucking blind and stupid. What's important is that we know that the order, from the FISA court, approved based on secret legal reasoning for secret goals, exists and forces us to confront, as we must again and again, the reality of the surveillance state we now exist in. You know it's there. What are you going to do about it?

We live in the post-privacy era, and, try as we might, unless you're gonna go Alex Jones-unhinged and live off the grid, our communications are now subject to constant intrusion and scrutiny. Fuck, the Rude Pundit believes that he is being monitored all the time. He knows that someone he doesn't know will have access to his email, his phone calls, his texts; that his movements can be tracked by cameras and satellites and the GPS in his iPhone; that every time he uses his EZ-Pass on the road, someone knows where he is. He accepts that as part of daily life in the West in the 21st century.

What the Obama administration did was completely legal. It was completely legal because the majority of the nation simply doesn't care about the vast array of powers granted to spy agencies under the Patriot Act. It will continue because there will be no outcry, there will be no outrage. There will merely be Democratic apologists for the president defending his actions; Republicans divided into two camps: clownish hypocrites who condemn Obama when they defended George W. Bush for doing the same thing without court approval and slavering hawks who don't give a shit how many rights are trampled on; and the uneasy alliance of libertarians and civil libertarians who are genuinely pissed off and scared by the confirmation of the secret surveillance of all of us.

The Rude Pundit doesn't fall into any of those camps. He takes the long view, backwards and forwards. Once the Patriot Act was passed and mass surveillance by the federal government was legalized, the cherry was popped. You can't unfuck the deflowered virgin. And, frankly, as soon as communications shifted from typed letters to whatever floats through the intertubes or in the ether, notions of communication and privacy shifted, whether we knew it or not. Mass adoption of new technology changes human beings' relationship with the world. Whether it's television's contribution to the death of other types of media and to much of the public sphere as a place of social and political interaction or cell phones changing how we speak and write to each other, it often takes a generation or two before we figure out just how the technology has transformed things (just in time for the new technology to change things again, of course). We need a new sociological and even linguistic paradigm for understanding our relationship to each other and our government in this post-privacy era.


snip

damn four paragraph rule.

[nashville_brook]

1. continuing..."No president is ever going to give back the powers..."

No president is ever going to give back the powers that were granted to George W. Bush in 2001. If you're scared that Obama has them, well, shit, a bunch of us warned you that Bush wasn't gonna be president forever. And even if the Patriot Act were, through some miracle, overturned in court or legislated out of existence, it's too late: the web of surveillance has been put in place. You can bet that its future legality has already been set up.

It is a frightening thought, yes, that our responsibility as citizens is not to try to reclaim our lost privacy. What revolution will accomplish that? It ain't gonna happen. It's sad, frustrating, enraging, and ultimately exhausting and enervating. That boat has sailed, and it ain't ever returning to port.

What we are left with is merely electing people who we believe will be wise shepherds of this power to invade our privacy whenever they wish in order to "protect us" from "terrorists" or the fake existential threats of the future. That is a sad reduction of democracy. That is the opposite of hope, no? Merely wanting to be led by people who won't harm us?

[warrior1]

2. thanks

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. Exactly correct...perhaps the best piece on this to yet be written

Great analysis, especially here:

The Rude Pundit doesn't fall into any of those camps. He takes the long view, backwards and forwards. Once the Patriot Act was passed and mass surveillance by the federal government was legalized, the cherry was popped. You can't unfuck the deflowered virgin. And, frankly, as soon as communications shifted from typed letters to whatever floats through the intertubes or in the ether, notions of communication and privacy shifted, whether we knew it or not. Mass adoption of new technology changes human beings' relationship with the world.

I tried to say the same here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2962546

and here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2963286

But nowhere near as forcefully or eloquently. Thumbs up big time to the Rude Pundit.

[Nay]

4. I've said the same thing for many years as well, and all along the computer nerds in my

family said it would never happen, you can make your computer totally secure, etc. They've shut up now.

Going forward, there will be no such thing as privacy anywhere, except possibly in your own home with the drapes closed. And not even then, if they are after you. So, as the Rude Pundit so eloquently says, our relationship with the world had irrevocably changed for the worse. It will be Huxley's Brave New World, mostly, not Orwell's 1984, but that's little consolation for those of us who truly have felt what physical freedom actually was like back in the day.

When I watch movies from the 70's or ones that re-create the 70's (oh, for example, The Zodiac Killer, or Seven Days of the Condor) I luxuriate in the feeling that there, in that time, there was actual freedom. I know how things were back then because I lived it. I could go around and do my thing with no one tracking and recording. Young adults today will never experience that, and I think that will lead to some real differences in how society actually functions.

Of course, if the grids go down, all bets are off.