Life in the surveillance state

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http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/blogs/blunt-instrument/life-in-the-surveillance-state-20130626-2owzq.html

“American intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden may expose top secret Australian intelligence gathering operations and embarrass Australia's relations with neighbouring Asian countries, Australian intelligence officials fear”.

Why?

Not why would Snowden do that, but why would our spooks even fear it? This report yesterday, on all of our spooks freaking out because all of their spooky friends in Washington and London are freaking out, seemed to imply the spooks were so freaked they’d forgotten that Snowden wasn’t working for the Russians or the Chinese or what’s left of the al Qaeda franchise. But he wasn't and isn't. He simply did what intelligence agencies do themselves all the time. He gave some information to the media.
He was just brave enough, or foolish enough, to identify himself, eventually, as the source. By talking to the media he undoubtedly broke a whole bunch of laws and violated some very punishing non-disclosure agreements, but the Espionage Act wasn't one of them.

Snowden didn’t, for instance, give away details of Australia’s leading role in the Echelon surveillance network, which gathers massive amounts of intelligence on South East Asian nations for an exclusive club comprising the Anglophone democracies (the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) – an operation the targeted countries are all well aware of, and resent ferociously. Snowden didn’t even give away details of legitimate operations against legitimate targets such as the Russian FSB or the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

No, Edward Snowden simply revealed industrial-scale mass surveillance of potentially everyone in the western world who’s not a terrorist and not a Russian or a Chinese spy. Originally it appeared to be an abuse of power restricted to the US, but it quickly became obvious that intelligence sharing arrangements between the Echelon Five cast the surveillance net out much wider.


Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/blogs/blunt-instrument/life-in-the-surveillance-state-20130626-2owzq.html#ixzz2XLQ6SmZj