The Snowden Effect: This Is Still Not America

[phantom power]

Now, it's the folks at Human Rights Watch who are pointing out that, while Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage, is not very good on television, and while Glenn Greenwald's probably a major doodyhead whom nobody will play with at recess, what the surveillance state in this country is doing -- and especially, what it's doing to national-security journalists -- continues to be a genuine threat to democracy, which is something we all used to value even more than whether or not someone is good on television. What's happening to the journalists is bad. What's happening to the lawyers is worse.

Lawyers we interviewed for this report expressed the greatest concern about situations where they have reason to think the US government might take an intelligence interest in a case, whether it relates to the activities of foreign governments or a drug or terrorism prosecution. As with the journalists, lawyers increasingly feel under pressure to adopt strategies to avoid leaving a digital trail that could be monitored; some use burner phones, others seek out technologies they feel may be more secure, and others reported traveling more for in-person meetings. Some described other lawyers expressing reluctance to take on certain cases that might incur surveillance, though by and large the attorneys interviewed for this report seemed determined to do their best to continue representing clients....

That "uncertainty" is the key. It is how you erode inconvenient freedoms and the institutions designed to protect them from within. You make lawyers uncertain whether they can talk to their clients. You make sources uncertain whether they should talk to reporters. You create a climate within a self-governing citizenry in which certain unspecified offenses against order carry certain unspecified punishments. You create a nation that is gunshy of its own foundting principles, and you make its people gunshy about standing up for themselves. You control the shadows in the inaccessible parts of the government. You can make those shadows fall wherever you want. And, those people why console themselves with the idea that "everybody knew" this was going on after 9/11, or with the idea that, hell, Amazon has your information, so what do you care if the NSA has it, those people should notice that this isn't about "national security" and terrorism any more. The drug warriors are in on the game, too, and it was in the "war" on drugs where a lot of the techniques that we found so odious in the aftermath of 9/11 were first bench-tested. (In fact, the original Patriot Act consisted mostly of ideas that had been lying around the FBI for more than a decade.) Uncertainty is born of everything we don't know, and the people who don't want us to know what they're doing in our name are its midwives. They know what they're doing. They are cultivating it quite deliberately, and for their own purposes. Very little of what they do is accidental. An uncertain people is a people easily led. That's the way it works now. That's the way it always has worked.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Snowden_Effect_And_Uncertainty