The Snowden revelations have fizzled politically, and reform isnt coming any time soon.
Once upon a time, Glenn Greenwald was a lonely voice in the blogging wilderness, and Edward Snowden was an isolated functionary at the heart of the American national-security state. Then everything seemed to change at once. Snowden, who was desperate to tell his fellow Americans of the evils of NSA surveillance, revealed his secrets to Greenwald, Congress erupted, the entire world got angry, and Greenwald won a Pulitzer and a fat media contract from a billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar while Snowden became the most famous exile in the world.
Now it looks very much like Greenwald is becoming a voice in the blogging wilderness again, and Snowden is watching from Moscow, once again isolated, as his explosive revelations fizzle out politically. On Tuesday, led by Republicans voting en masse, the US Senate defeated a motion to vote on the USA Freedom Act, which would have curbed the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records. The new, harder-line Republican Congress coming in January doesnt seem likely to pass the bill either, to the point where Greenwald lamented in blog post Wednesday that it was self-evidently moronic to rely on the US government to fix the US government. Governments dont walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and thats particularly true of empires, he wrote. The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSAs powers of mass surveillance.
Nor does Greenwald think that the courts, especially the Supreme Court, will do the trick, despite a Dec. 2013 district court ruling against the NSAs phone-data collection program: When it comes to placing real limits on the NSA, I place almost as little faith in the judiciary as I do in the Congress and executive branch. As for the noble libertarian entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, theyre also dealing falsely with us, Greenwald said. The big internet companies deliberately supported a watered-down bill to point to something called reform so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest, he wrote.
Of course, by the entire system in DC and Americas entire private sector Greenwald is suggesting that pretty much everybodythe whole republicis failing him and isnt going to deliver the changes he believes are necessary. Thats a bit of an odd conclusion, considering that Snowden and Greenwald were, not long ago, waxing triumphant about the way their revelations were changing the conversation. Their fundamental premise: If only people could be awakened to the horrific extent of the national-security state, they could be depended upon to act on their own. For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the missions already accomplished, Snowden told Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of last year. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didnt want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed.
But society doesnt appear now to be pushing much for change, and the public seems to have spoken on Nov. 4, the first time the nation had gone to the federal ballot box since the Snowden revelations broke. One of the less-noted messages out of the midterm election was that virtually every NSA supporter was re-elected handily, and some of the most vociferous proponents of tighter restrictions on surveillance, like Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), lost in surprising upsets. Even more to the point, an issue that only a year ago had Congress in an uproarwith members getting earfuls about NSA intrusions at constituent town meetingswas almost a complete no-show issue in the election, the first to be held since the Snowden revelations. Very few candidates brought the NSA up.
A few things, of course, have changed in the year or so since the Snowden revelations startled Washington and set the legislation in motion. For one thing, the NSA has begun internal reform under the direction of the White House, although Obama left to Congress such critical issues as how the NSA should collect telephone metadata. Meanwhile the rise of new violent groups like ISIS, with their seemingly regularly scheduled beheadings of hostages, has given NSA hawks new ammunition. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday, former NSA director Michael Hayden and attorney general Michael Mukasey called the USA Freedom Act NSA reform that only ISIS could love.
But perhaps the more profound trend is that Americans just dont seem to care as much as we once thought a year agoan outcome that Snowden himself feared, once talking of NSA fatigue. With the most sensational revelations past us, the lingering concern over NSA surveillance has become diluted by a general sense of resignation over the loss of privacy. This is not much of a surprise, frankly. We already live in an EZ-Pass world, one in which we are willing to let the government keep a record of everywhere we drive in exchange for the mere convenience of getting through the toll booth more quickly. We shop online despite knowing that the commercial world will track our buying preferences. We share our personal reflections and habits not only with Facebook and Google but also (often unknowingly) with thousands of online marketers who want our information. One thing I find amusing is the absolute terror of Big Brother, when weve all already gone and said, Cuff me, to Little Brother, John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., told me in 2013 shortly after the Snowden story came out.
A remarkable study published earlier this month by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, which conducts independent research on privacy and data collection, found that in the year and a half since the Snowden revelations only a relatively small number of Americans, about 14 percent, care enough about their privacy on a consistent basis to change their behavior so as to preserve it. That number is unchanged from a Poneman study done in 2012, before the Snowden revelations. These motivated few are the people who will not buy a book on Amazon because they would have to surrender information about themselves, or who dont go to certain websites if they fear theyre going to be behaviorally profiled, or wont contribute to political campaigns for the same reason. By contrast, a substantial majority of Americans, about 63 percent, say they care about their privacy, but theres no evidence to suggest theyre going to do anything different to preserve it, says Larry Ponemon, who runs the institute. Its very troubling to me, to be honest. People talk a good game. They tell us they are really concerned about what the NSA is doing, but in the end they dont really care enough to take a stand.
The Pew Research Center has also just published a study, Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era, which concludes that even though across the board, there is a universal lack of confidence among adults in the security of everyday communications channels, people dont really have a strong sense of how to act to change that. According to the Pew survey, 61 percent of adults say they would like to do more to protect do more to protect their privacy but they feel overwhelmed, and they dont know where to begin, says Mary Madden, the principle author of the Pew survey.
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Why the surveillance state lives on
