There is no shortage of outraged commentary about scope the extent of government surveillance as revealed by the Guardian and Washington Post. Here's an excerpt from one of the milder examples, "The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty To Fight Terror:"
The U.S. should certainly try to prevent terrorist attacks, and there is a lot that government can and has done since 9/11 to improve security in ways that are totally unobjectionable. But it is not rational to give up massive amounts of privacy and liberty to stay marginally safer from a threat that, however scary, endangers the average American far less than his or her daily commute. In 2011*, 32,367 Americans died in traffic fatalities. Terrorism killed 17 U.S. civilians that year. How many Americans feared dying in their vehicles more than dying in a terrorist attack?
One of the more interesting defenses of PRISM comes from the creator of the acclaimed TV series, The Wire. Writing in his blog The Audacity of Despair (great name), David Simon employs the same hot, hip, urgent style of The Wire to say, in effect, much ado about nothing:
You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200
million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And
you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable
consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had
been discovered to the government’s shame.
Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian,
which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights
of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author
of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s
not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single
customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s
indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”
Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can
assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary
process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been
so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal
standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to
cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles?
Same old stuff.
Read the whole piece here.