Where do people here stand on this whole controversy?
I'm personally seeing quite a gulf between UK/EU and US reactions. As is usual. And I don't really understand that... are more people worried about it than it actually appears?
Because if not, how is it that some American's have come to think of their security services as infallible bastions of trust?
In September 1990 - did they not fabricate satellite photos showing Iraqi troops at the border of Saudi Arabia?
In September 2002 - did we not have the bullshit September Dossier, claiming Iraq not only had WMD, but that they were able to be deployed within 45 minutes?
In February 2003 - did we not have a Curveball-sourced global presentation of bullshit at the UN security council, that turned out to be total bollocks?
Have we not had countless inmates detained at Gitmo, with no thought to their rights, no due process and no apparent bevvy of evidence with which to prosecute them?
Every terror attack on US and UK soil, or on US/UK assets abroad - in the last 10-20 years, is an attack they have failed to stop. We only have their word on the amount of 'plots' that they have successfully foiled.
I read people defending the honour of these agencies with utter bemusement. What have they DONE to earn that high esteem? I don't know enough of what they do to trust them. Our politicians have simply empowered them to erode our privacy and our rights with the expectation that we will 'understand'.
Why are people so quick to swallow the idea that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about? Why are they so eager to believe that only superficial information will be collected?
Terrorism is not common enough to justify the mass data gathering programmes that countries like the US and UK are embarked upon. Just as people thought there was a commie on every corner, living in their street, eyeing everything and everone with suspicion - we now seem to believe that everyone is a potential terrorist and that all activity should be monitored in some way. Is that not bonkers?
Even if you buy the idea that they NEED all this information to perform 'needle in a haystack' searches upon their own their own intelligence data -- who is watching the watchmen? Our intelligence services and their hierarchies are not transparent. Given events in the last decade, we have very little reason to trust that what they publicly say is true. There is no assurance that this warrantless information gathering, that Snowdon has exposed, cannot be abused. It is not 'intelligence' to simply snoop on everybody; the NSA and other security agencies should be narrowing their focus, not broadening it. It seems to me they are using the continuing climate of fear to empower elite politicians with information. All the information they could ever need to line the pockets of militarist interests, to quell discussion and dissent, to prolong political corruption and to cement a corrosive hegemony through continued conflict and abuse of power: undemocratically and artificially.
At this rate, people harping on about the abuses of other state actors won't have to wait long before we find ourselves with something worse. Maybe its idealist to think we can have proper privacy and freedom, but I prefer the idea of being an idealist to just willingly allowing ourselves to live in some kind of quasi Gestapo or Stasi surveillance programme. Just as people on our side of the world see North Korean and Iranian leaders as evil caricatures, I can actually kind of understand why people elsewhere in the world see us as corrupt, imperialist and sinister. We are never going to change that with shit like this.
In my view -- if we accept these invasions into our lives, and jail Edward Snowdon for exposing them, the terrorists have already won. Bin Laden will have died victorious. Isn't it time to get SANE with domestic and foreign policy?
