The “debate” among the Senators that preceded the vote was darkly funny and deeply boring, in equal measure. The black humor was due to the way one GOP Senator after the next – led by ranking Senate Intelligence Committee member Saxby Chambliss (pictured above) – stood up and literally screeched about 9/11 and ISIS over and over and over, and then sat down as though they had made a point. (...)
So the pro-NSA Republican Senators were actually arguing that if the NSA were no longer allowed to bulk-collect the communication records of Americans inside the U.S., then ISIS would kill you and your kids. But because they were speaking in an empty chamber and only to their warped and insulated D.C. circles and sycophantic aides, there was nobody there to cackle contemptuously or tell them how self-evidently moronic it all was. So they kept their Serious Faces on like they were doing The Nation’s Serious Business, even though what was coming out of their mouths sounded like the demented ramblings of a paranoid End is Nigh cult.
The boredom of this spectacle was simply due to the fact that this has been seen so many times before – in fact, every time in the post-9/11 era that the U.S. Congress pretends publicly to debate some kind of foreign policy or civil liberties bill. Just enough members stand up to scream “9/11″ and “terrorism” over and over until the bill vesting new powers is passed or the bill protecting civil liberties is defeated. (...)
All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. Government is . . . the U.S. Government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.
The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it somehow did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight means they’d easily co-opt the entire reform process: just like how the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of Intelligence Committees (which were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme IC servants like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger) and the creation of FISA “oversight” courts (instantly turned into rubber stamps by installing subservient judges and having it all function in total secrecy).
Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing, the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s vintage Obama: enact something that is called “reform” - so that he can give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and responded to their concerns – but which in actuality changes almost nothing, thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: be able to point to something called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest.
In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why there haven’t been significant changes from all the disclosures. I vehemently disagree with the premise of the question, which equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally. Those limitations are going to come from – are now coming from – very different places:
1) Individuals refusing to use internet services that compromise their privacy. The FBI and other U.S. government agencies, as well as the UKGovernment, are apoplectic over new products from Google and Apple that are embedded with strong encryption, precisely because they know that such protections, while far from perfect, are serious impediments to their power of mass surveillance. To make this observation does not mean, as some deeply confused people try to suggest, that one believes that Silicon Valley companies care in the slightest about people’s privacy rights and civil liberties.
As much of the Snowden reporting has proven, these companies don’t care in the slightest about any of that. Just as the telecoms have been for years, U.S. tech companies were more than happy to eagerly cooperate with the NSA in violating their users’ privacy en masse when they could do so in the dark. But it’s precisely because they can’t do it in the dark any more that things are changing, and significantly. Rather obviously: that’s not because these tech companies suddenly discovered their belief in the value of privacy. They haven’t, and it doesn’t take any special insight or brave radicalism to recognize that. That’s obvious.
Instead, these changes are taking place because these companies are petrified that the perception of their collaboration with the NSA will harm their future profits, by making them vulnerable to appeals from competing German, Korean and Brazilian social media companies that people shouldn’t use Facebook or Google because they will hand over that data to the NSA. That – fear of damage to future business prospects - is what is motivating these companies to at least try to convince users of their commitment to privacy. And the more users refuse to use the services of Silicon Valley companies that compromise their privacy – and, conversely, resolve to use only truly pro-privacy companies instead – the stronger that pressure will become.
Those who like to claim that nothing has changed from the NSA revelations simply ignore the key facts that negate that claim, including the serious harm to the U.S. tech sector from these disclosures, driven by the newfound knowledge that U.S. companies are complicit in mass surveillance. Obviously, tech companies don’t care at all about privacy, but they care a lot about that.
Just yesterday, it was announced that WhatsApp “will start bringing end-to-end encryption to its 600 million users,” which “would be the largest implementation of end-to-end encryption ever.” None of this is a silver bullet: the NSA will work hard to circumvent this technology and tech companies are hardly trustworthy, being notoriously close to the U.S. government and often co-opted themselves. But as more individuals demand more privacy protection, the incentives are strong. As The Verge notes about WhatsApp’s new encryption scheme, “‘End-to-end’ means that, unlike messages encrypted by Gmail or Facebook Chat, WhatsApp won’t be able to decrypt the messages itself, even if the company is compelled by law enforcement.”
by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images
