I spoke with retired CIA veteran Ray McGovern for a TV series I am producing about how government spying intimidates people in government. He told me:
"Everybody is afraid. It's not just the journalists, it's people like Barack Obama, it's people like Diane Feinstein--think about what the NSA has on Diane Feinstein and her husband, who has made billions from Defense, and post office, and all kinds of nice cozy contracts, okay? This goes back to J. Edgar Hoover--
So far, all the noise and media condemnations have not led to meaningful reforms. or legal restraints on the NSA's electronic octopus. The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer writes in the Guardian about law suits against the NSA that were thrown out of Court:
"What's surprising -- even remarkable -- is what the government says on the way to its conclusion. It says, in essence, that the Constitution is utterly indifferent to the NSA's large-scale surveillance of Americans' international telephone calls and emails:
"The privacy rights of US persons in international communications are significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated , when those communications have been transmitted to or obtained from non-US persons located outside the United States.
That phrase -- "if not completely eliminated" -- is unusually revealing. Think of it as the Justice Department's twin to the NSA's "collect it all."
Leave it to the outspoken Chinese Artist Ai Wei Wei who has been spied on and jailed in China to recognize the similarities between pervasive Chinese surveillance and the US imitation of it. He writes: "Civilisation is built on that trust and everyone must fight to defend it, and to protect our vulnerable aspects -- our inner feelings, our families. We must not hand over our rights to other people. No state power should be given that kind of trust. Not China. Not the US."
Easier said than done. As we focus on the government role in spying, we seem to be ignoring the commercial aspects of wiretapping and eavesdropping.
American corporations are not just cooperating with the NSA but competing with it. And, not just with Google cars photographing every street in the world.
Just ask Donald Sterling, formerly of the LA Clippers Owner and jerk as he may be, about what non-government spying did it to him. Who has been prosecuted in that eavesdropping incident?
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