The "Privacy moderate" desperate to avoid the full extent of establishment's extreme behavior.

[kpete]

I am mystified by the "privacy moderate" who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.

What I sense, but cannot prove, is the privacy moderate's desperation to avoid facing the full extent of the establishment's extreme behavior. Americans once condemned such excesses. The Obama Administration is nowhere near as morally odious as, e.g., the bygone East German state. But Americans didn't just criticize its surveillance apparatus, the Stasi, because the East German regime used it for evil. Quite apart from the character of the regime and its secret police, Americans found the very notion of secret, pervasive spying on innocent citizens repugnant. We found the notion of vast files kept on private citizens creepy, because that isn't the role the state ought to play in a free society. Today, the American state is engaged in intentionally spying on tens of millions of innocent citizens. It did its utmost to hide the truth about that spying.

Civil libertarians are objecting as if this is a historic scandal of the utmost importance -- and it is exactly that. Privacy moderates are obsessed with policing the objections for hyperbole. They can tell their grandkids, "When I found out America was secretly spying on tens of millions of innocents, I focused on criticizing the people who overreacted rhetorically." It's like the blogs that spent the run-up to the Iraq War obsessing about scattered Bush-Hitler signs at anti-war protest rallies, as if, absent push-back, the nation was ready to side with the sign-makers; or like a doctor who worries more about cosmetic scars than cratering white blood-cell counts.

[truedelphi]

1. It may be true that the Obama Administration and its acceptance of the spying is

"nowhere near as odious as, e.g., the bygone East German State."

But this program is in its infancy. It has taken only baby steps so far.

Perhaps the worst repercussion of the STASI program was that while the West German nation became an industrial power house, since that nation spent its monetary resources productively, the East German state predictably fell into disrepair. Things were so bad in East Germany that its citizens willingly risked snipers while they crossed the Wall to reach the West.

It doesn't take much in the way of clairvoyance and psychic powers to know that the worst feature of this American STASI could very well be the determination of the Political Class to continue diverting the military budget into Surveillance Programs,while all other programs are pushed to the side. Even thirty percent of the current one trillion point two dollar annual military budget will make the Surveillance Enablers wealthy beyond even their greedy little dreams.

Yes the Surveillance Programs will make some inside the One Percent very rich, yet nothing PRISM does produces anything of value - no cure for cancer and other diseases, no new style battery for storing solar energy, no personal helicopters for the masses to use in their commutes. Instead a Surveillance Sector can only feed off of and increase paranoia. Our infra structure will continue to fall apart; our schools will continue to suffer, and the rest of our society will enter a Mad Max lifestyle, while the One Percent cashes their PRISM paychecks and laughs at the pathetic creatures that live outside their gated communities.

[grasswire]

2. well said

thank you

[msongs]

3. it is way more than acceptance, it is creation of and advocacy for.... nt