Maybe I am reading this wrong, but my impression is that you are saying that people should not feel indignant now because the US has a history of similar overreaches. If that’s the case, I don’t agree with that stance. We did know that The Bush administration was copying all AT&T internet traffic for a time, but we did not have clear evidence that it continued. We also did not have evidence, particularly evidence confirmed by the government, of massive coordination by the plurality of major internet companies that provide email, search and other messaging and storage technologies. Before this week, I did believe that the NSA probably needed a court order to get my emails from Google. I did not know that Google was providing them to the NSA a priori. Nevertheless, even if there were smoke that people should have picked up on earlier, before last week, alleging that the US was doing just this would have been met with disbelief in the wider media. It would have been labeled as unfounded paranoia. The PRISM revelations, and the government confirmation, has provided us proof of a very large scope program, and signals not only the direction that the US is taking, but that while Obama once felt he had to campaign on a different position, from here on out, total information awareness is to be a non-issue. With this story and the Obama administration’s response, the US surveillance narrative is moving from scattered evidence of abuse to the normalization of a police state.
No, sorry if it came off that way. I'm just miffed about how all of a sudden every journalist/blogger and internet commenter is an expert on NSA and PRISM, and many of the articles I've read over the last few days act like this is something new that just happened. I'm more frustrated that people aren't doing their research, and haven't cared for the last 6 decades about this stuff, and even after this NSA/PRISM thing none of them still did any research. That program started in 97 under Clinton, it was exposed in 2006 under Bush. A lot of these programs really took off under Clinton, because let's not forget, he was a two term President that was in office during the internet boom and massive growth. A new technology that needed to be monitored (for them). A lot of new programs and a ton of funding got funneled into programs like this during that time, because they saw so many communications moving to this new medium. Every President since the cold war has been involved in these programs, be it democrat or republican. Exactly. I hang around some conspiracy communities, though I think most of those people are nuts and think most of their "theories" are complete bullshit (I don't even like mentioning that I read conspiracy sites or like associating myself with them), but I've always been interested in the capabilities of the US government. I remember reading about ECHELON when I was in middle school, and back then, even mentioning something like that to people was met with people saying I "shouldn't be so paranoid", and "why would the government want to listen to my phone calls?" type responses. So no, my previous comment you replied to wasn't telling people "it's okay because it's always been around", it was more ripping on that writer for not being a good writer, reporter, or doing any research whatsoever. Now that the stories out about NSA/PRISM, I want to remind and educate people when I have the chance to inform them that there are hundreds of programs, and that they date back decades. The outrage needs to be focused on the spying on American citizens in general, not the NSA and PRISM specifically. I just wish more reporters and journalists were talking about the history of these programs, and how bad it really is, and how massive these programs really are. I just fear that like every other "internet outrage" that this will be forgotten in a week or two, and everyone will go back to talking about how much the Xbox One sucks or something.you are saying that people should not feel indignant now because the US has a history of similar overreaches.
We did know that The Bush administration was copying all AT&T internet traffic for a time, but we did not have clear evidence that it continued.
It would have been labeled as unfounded paranoia.