In case you haven’t seen it, there’s been a dramatic new turn in the NSA/PRISM disclosures story. Working with Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian the leaker has revealed himself, fully. Name, photographs, a lengthy interview and a video explaining his decisions.
Whatever you think of his actions and the equities involved, you should take a moment to watch the video. His name is Edward Snowden. He’s 29 years old and seems, for lack of a better word, like a pretty normal or average 29 year old American man, perhaps slightly more hipsterish than some would expect from someone so deep inside the NSA. He describes a series of jobs as a computer technician and systems administrator in various parts of the US Intelligence Community over almost a decade, first inside the government and later as an embedded contractor. Read More
I don’t agree with some of what’s implicit in it. But this timeline of expanding government surveillance law going back almost 40 years is very helpful. Prepared by Propublica.
The heavy equipment operator who was at work when that building collapse happened in Philly, which killed 6 and injured 13, was allegedly stoned.
TPM Reader ML isn’t buying Simon’s arguments …
Ugh. I almost feel like Simon was trolling us all with his jousting match with a phalanx of straw men.
The first half of his tirade is against the person who thinks the NSA is listening in on our phone calls. I have seen precisely zero people argue this. The point has been that the metadata is problematic enough.
TPM Reader NB isn’t buying David Simon’s line about NSA surveillance …
As a fan of the Wire, I was pretty disappointed with Simon’s analysis, but as someone who works with Big Data and knows what it is capable of, not very surprised.
TPM Reader SL sends a very candid note, dissenting from a lot of reaction to the NSA revelations. But also conceding that her reaction to these things significantly depends on her level of trust in the current head of the government, which is obviously a problem, especially in our highly polarized political society.
From TPM Reader SL …
I have to say that I generally agree with David Simon’s article about data collection. I’ve been thinking something along these lines all along as I’ve watched this story unfold, and wondering if I’ve just lost my sense of what freedom and privacy mean or whether the meaning of these events has been vastly over-hyped. I’m kind of relieved to hear that you’re asking similar questions.
I’ve gotten a lot of great responses to my question below about David Simon’s piece. The only problem is that there are so many good ones it’s a little hard to decide which ones to publish. I’d say they range more somewhat more pro-Simon than anti-. But that’s probably at least somewhat because of how I framed the question.
As I noted, I’m still trying to firm up my take on all this. My gut reaction makes me a surveillance skeptic skeptic, as it were. It is hard for me to get past the mix of hysteria and technological illiteracy. At the same time, it’s hard to evaluate the ‘robust’ privacy protections built into the system when we don’t have any idea what they are.
Please keep the emails coming. And if you didn’t see the post below, I’m looking for responses to this post.
I’m still trying to make sense of and settle my own opinions on all the news we’ve heard about NSA surveillance over the last week. But I found this blog post by David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, at a minimum, a clarifying rejoinder to a lot of the hyperbole and dystopian fantasies I’m hearing and reading about all this.
Give it a read and let me know what you think.
Michele Bachmann is retiring. But meet her possible replacement, Tom Emmer. He may actually top her on the Crazy scale.
Romney: “I wish the hurricane hadn’t happened when it did because it gave the President a chance to be presidential and to be out showing sympathy for folks.” Watch.
It’s easy to say that this makes Romney some sort of massive egotist who only sees the world through the prism of his own self-interest. I don’t think we can say that. What I do think we can say is that Romney has a deep predilection to say stupid or clueless things that was always gonna make the president thing a tough sell.