gosh. well, here's the way i've tried to get some angle on this.
first, the program has been FOR SEVEN YEARS monitoring emails sent, addresses of recipients and senders, for the most part. no content. it seems this is roughly equivalent to the post office knowing my address, and actually handling my mail, seeing where it goes. not sure how we can get around that, but also don't recall too much gnashing of anyone's teeth about the post office. recording that info, another matter, tho perhaps the PO has been doing that for years, but i don't know. still, not as if it's info that is not out there.
second, where a person visits - say online or thru calls - is not necessarily as 'protected' as you might want to believe, nor should it necessarily be so. when you step outside your home onto the sidewalk or street, your presence and comings and goings become not only public knowledge, but public domain. seems to me a similar case can be made about the phone and internet connections. tho these are technically speaking now not publicly owned like the sidewalks, but corporate owned, they are nonetheless publicly utilized, supporting public exchanges. what happens once you enter a private domain, just as when you enter someone's home, that should be private as long as both parties agree. so the phone conversations themselves - and i would submit net transactions, just as store transactions (which are not entirely private at all, really) - remain private. we live in our homes, and what occurs there is generally speaking private. but how much electricity you use, your address, your property value, taxes, all that stuff that the public utilities etc. pipe in to your home to support and sustain it within the community - NONE of that stuff is particularly private at all. nor should it be. even if you try to disappear to the wild and live off the land or whatever, you remain connected on some level. but hey, no man is an island; we are a social species.
third, there's been some pearl-clutching about how much info they gather about purchases and transactions and such. this is info the retailers gather, and i've long suspected they were as eager - if not more - to have a way to collect such customer targeting trash as the government. i tend to believe that's correct. nevertheless, such info that is already public - such as zip code, just for one instance - gives a boatload of info that is just out there, very legally public; voting likelihood, income likelihood, school attendance, etcetcetc.
finally (at least for this way overlong comment; apologies), as with all protected rights and privileges of being a citizen, there are limits. we will ALWAYS have to weigh our rights against our responsibilities to the community as a whole, our privileges against our priorities. bill maher's comments on how important it is to consider how easy it is for example to imagine NUKES being smuggled in and detonated in a public place prompts the support of a (pardon the expression) WELL-REGULATED intelligence agency that will do just that. we will not likely ever know precisely how many times deadly plans have already been thwarted by such efforts.
from the examples i have read about, there is no doubt we have teetered on the edge since WWII, and plummeted precipitously since 9/11. but i would submit that obama is doing the best he can to walk that fine line of protecting our rights while also protecting our existence. and while walking that line, he is also trying to walk back all that we lost in the terminal and eternal "war on terr'r." think for just one minute how you would make that call were you to hold both the safety and civil rights of the country in your hands; would you be the one to sacrifice the very lives of any citizens in order to satisfy the most extreme and absolute interpretation of those rights? whether with surveillance or drones, how do you actually execute that calculus?
i for one am not just a wee bit suspicious of the timing of this shriekout, soon after obama's doctrinal declaration that we will end that pseudo-war, and all the drone and gitmo trappings. call me conspiratorial, but "exposing" something that has been around for 7 years, and has since obama been brought back within legal boundaries (i tend to believe it has; could be wrong; and now he's trying to even walk back those legal boundaries to constitutional ones; see his speech), in the middle of the sick RWN determination to make a scandal where there is none - why, conjuring up this insanity that will turn even obama's base against him? sheer genius; evil, wicked, unamerican, treasonous genius. we must be very careful not to swallow anything like this.
do note most stories are now walking themselves back on all this, and cooler heads who actually know about the details and history are setting us all straight. mind you, i admire glenn greenwald in many respects, and we need as a society the extremely pure gadflies like him and chris hedges etc. in order to keep our ideals vividly on the radar in order to move the middle closer to that (instead of the other, obviously crazed direction). but we also must be realistic. and that is where perspective comes in handy. if this admittedly very long-winded diatribe (apologies again; i confess, it was stream of consciousness) does not convince you, please visit david simon's blog and bill maher's 2 cents on it, posted on DU.
i mean, folks, we really must all learn - in this age of media manipulation at the speed of the internet - to CHILL, stop, and reflect; reason is clouded and crowded out when we over-react and lose perspective.
for those of you who lasted this long, thx.
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