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by shadowgovt
2272 days ago
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I don't think the issue went away because anyone conspired to bury it. I think the issue went away because, on average, Americans are comfortable with the arrangement that the intelligence agencies have broad power to dragnet data. They either don't get that these tools could be used against them by unethical government agents or they know that possibility exists but they trust the checks and balances against it and think the risk is outweighed by the benefit to law enforcement and the national intelligence community in managing the international threat of global terrorist activity (which, itself, leverages modern communications tools to communicate rapidly, move rapidlt, hide from law enforcement and military powers, etc.). 9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of information analysis; the information needed to stop it existed but had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans are extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way again, even 20 years later. |
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It's not just the US, it's the whole of the Western world. The UK in particular has been very complicit with the US in their joint mass surveillance.
The threat of terrorist activity in the west is vanishingly low, and IMO, is partially driven by western foreign policy. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the disgusting, utterly horrifying organised torture program the CIA has undertaken at "black sites" has certainly not helped (I doubt since an organised horror has taken place since the Nazis).
> 9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of information analysis; the information needed to stop it existed but had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans are extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way again, even 20 years later.
I don't want to get deep in 9/11 in particular, but mass surveillance wasn't the solution - the 5-eyes' toxic, oil-driven relationship with Saudi Arabia was a big factor, and the CIA not hiding information from the FBI would very likely have stopped it.
We've seen similar failings on a smaller scale with incidents in Europe, where the perpetrators were known to the authorities beforehand. Even where they communicated with each other "openly" using SMS, politicians called for a ban on encryption - these parasites take every opportunity to spread FUD and use it to their advantage.
I think where we at least agree is a belief that many people simply don't care; they don't understand the risks with the current government, let alone future ones.