Edward Snowden: The conversation has just begun. And it has begun very late.

Snowden Isn’t the Story: 

Dispelling Post-9/11 Privacy Delusions

Judy Bachrach

So the latest from the US National Security Agency is that (a) terror plots in more than 20 countries (names of those vulnerable countries, other than the US, unspecified) were foiled thanks to two of the agency’s data mining programs; (b) one of those programs isn’t nearly as intrusive as the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden says; and (c) anyway, gathered data are regularly destroyed every five years.


(And if you believe that last, I have a large intact compound in Abbottabad I’d like to sell you…)

Now I think we have to be honest here: many of us around the world, media people included, suspected the NSA was checking out lots of phone numbers, lots of e-mails, lots of computers long, long before Snowden moved to Hong Kong and began talking. In many ways, the attacks of September 11th were to the United States what the 1918 Treaty of Versailles ultimately was to Germany: a source of deep and substantial humiliation; the start of a sense of perpetual vulnerability; and an excuse to abrogate rights for decades thereafter.
............






Read more: www.worldaffairsjournal.org/