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by achughes
4753 days ago
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Except nothing has changed. This has been going on for enough time that if the average Internet user hasn't been effected by it yet then they don't have much to worry about in the near future. So for the immediate future there are absolutely no implications on users other than being aware that someone can look at your communications, which you should have assumed already. Because if the NSA didn't already have your information than Google, Facebook and every other social network certainly did, something that we have been well aware of for a long time. |
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That's from the things you CAN see (I don't see ordinary people being harmed directly by this program). What about the things you can't directly see or measure?
Some issues that come to mind:
1) This kind of privacy abuse opens wide open the Overton window about surveillance. Today it's the secret services. Tomorrow the general government (from IRS to the FDA). The day after tomorrow insurance companies, corporations, etc.
2) This kind of privacy abuse harms directly people that the government, men in power, lobbies with heavy clout, etc, consider dangerous. Dissidents, activists, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, hackers, etc. To draw an historical analogy, people like MLK, Aaron Swartz, Mother Jones, Howard Zinn, Phil Zimmerman, EFF, Timothy Leary, I.F. Stone, and thousands more. People that make society better, or push certain aspects of it forward.
Those people ARE constantly monitored by the government, are harassed regularly, are being blackmailed or even made to shut up or disappear, are threatened with legal action for bogus charges, etc. It's difficult to measure the harm on a society's future caused by enabling the government to keep tabs and better control these kind of people.
3) It shows a huge moral, political and judicial decline that Nixon got punished and yelled at, by the media, for Watergate (eavesdropping on the opposite party), and in 2013 American accepts it's government eavesdropping, keeping tabs, etc, on virtually ALL Americans.