Sorry, But No, We Don’t Hate the Surveillance State

[Chef Ramsay]

Edward Snowden won at the Oscars, but he’s losing in RL.

We don’t hate the surveillance state. We’re embracing it more and more.

Citizenfour may have won at the Oscars, but its subject, Edward Snowden, has lost.

That’s the big takeaway from last week’s CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

When it comes to mass surveillance—despite the strenuous efforts of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and others—establishment Democrats have simply shut down internal political opposition to the spying state.

On the right, where libertarian idealism and conservative paranoia still thrive, Snowden’s spirit, if not always his means, stood more of a chance to catch on.

Until, it would seem, now.

At one CPAC panel, former National Security Agency head Gen. Michael Hayden drew cries of disbelief when he called himself “an unrelenting libertarian.” Astonishing as his remarks may be, it’s hard not to think the groans and shouts arose because no one and nothing was there to stop Hayden from saying them.

Heckle in vain, partisans of liberty. The worm of freedom has turned. “Judging by this afternoon at CPAC and the rhetoric around ISIS,” National Review chief Rich Lowry tweeted from the conference, “the party has left behind [its] flirtation w[ith] Rand Paul-style foreign policy.”

Republicans are returning to the surveillance fold for the same reasons everyone is, worldwide. Last year, Angela Merkel warned the German Parliament that her country’s trust with the United States would have to be slowly repaired. “But the cooperation never really stopped,” as The Washington Post reported. “The public backlash over Snowden often obscured a more complicated reality for Germany and other aggrieved U.S. allies. They may be dismayed by the omnivorous nature of the intelligence apparatus the United States has built since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but they are also deeply dependent on it.”

Aren’t we all. Online, we lack the kind of robust self-defense culture that led, in meatspace of yore, to constitutional protections for those bearing arms. Helplessly dependent on government spies to combat enemies we cannot see, we have little choice but to opt in to one form or another of surveillance state. Since Snowden’s revelations, a Pew study reveals, the NSA’s approval ratings have cracked 50 percent. And in a sign of what’s to come, just over two-thirds of respondents aged 18 to 29 gave the NSA the A-OK. Fifty-five percent of those aged 30 to 49 did too.

A lot of self-esteem is on the line, here, and a lot of comfortable illusion. Surely a people resigned to data serfdom must not have their libertarian self-identification taken away, too. If the Constitution can be a living document, why can’t liberty be a living doctrine?

More...http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/sorry-but-no-we-don-t-hate-the-surveillance-state.html

[BADecker]

If somebody quietly developed real perpetual motion, in his back yard, without anyone else knowing about it... perpetual motion that was simple and easy for every average American and world citizen to build and apply to his energy needs, right at home, without any special equipment to speak of... if there was surveillance that observed this, would they not report it to the higher ups? If the inventor did not have a method for automatically spreading the news around the nation, if his invention was unknown to anyone else except the surveillance team and those the team told, they'd kill the guy and destroy his invention, all in the name of world security. Then they would debrief the surveillance team, and kill all of them that understood how the perpetual motion machine worked.