That is the opposite of hope, no? Merely wanting to be led by people who won't harm us?

[phantom power]

I feel pretty sure that this was never stoppable. The tech was going to be invented, and it was going to be used. It will only get more sophisticated and powerful. We can, and should, do our best to influence who uses it and how it is used, but we'll never "control" it or put it back in the bottle.

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.

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?

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2013/06/nsa-phone-record-collecting-and.html

[dkf]

1. Your post just broke my heart. :(

[Mnemosyne]

2. Yep, mine too.

[phantom power]

4. Some of my thinking on privacy dates back to an essay by David Brin...

(which appeared a bit before literally everything in the world ended up on web, so I've had no luck so far digging it up)

However, the basic argument went like:

(a) Surveillance technologies will become more powerful and more ubiquitous. Cameras will shrink, to the size of birds, insects, eventually dust. Data access and searchability will become inceasingly powerful.

(b) We are, for the most part, powerless to stop this. Even if by some miracle private individuals and entities don't bother inventing it, governments surely will, if for no other reason than that they'll *have* to assume some other government is if they aren't.

(c) This does not mean that things are hopeless. Our best hope is to embrace the technology. That is, for the love of god don't try to pretend it isn't there, or *only* the governments will end up with it, which would be Bad.

Since then, I think we've also seen the humans will simply adapt culturally to a world with less privacy. Lots of my friends really do seem to publish their lives on Facebook or other social media. This is weird to me, and yet they are all my age, and lord only knows how my daughter will view the world she lives in.

One particular technology that individual citizens so far have not actually made much use of is encryption. It is possible to encrypt emails, and with the proper software, there's no reason that we couldn't encrypt our texting, phone calls, etc. I don't know if one can ever make onesself "NSA-proof" but we can, with existing crypto, raise the bar a heck of a lot higher than we do.

[dkf]

5. Apple's encryption was too good for them so they just demanded that apple unlock it.

There's no way to escape.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. Our technology is surpassing our humanity.