US President Barack Obama (AFP Photo/Saul Loeb)
An even more stark example of double standards has emerged this August, when a leak apparently jeopardized an ongoing operation investigating a planned Al Qaeda attack against a US embassy in the Middle East. This leak has apparently caused immediate and quantifiable damage to the capabilities of the NSA in monitoring terrorism, and yet nobody has been held to account.
But, hey, why bother with a difficult investigation into leaking when you can go after the low-hanging fruit -- otherwise known as principled whistleblowers who "out" themselves for the public good?
This to me indicates what the US intelligence infrastructure deems to be the real current issue -- "the insider threat" who might reveal crucial information about state crimes to the world's population.
And yet the US representatives still trot out the tired old lines about terrorism. Senator Lindsey Graham stated this week that the current level of endemic surveillance would have prevented 9/11. Well, no, as previous intelligence personnel have pointed out. Coleen Rowley -- Time Person of the Year 2002 -- is famous for highlighting that the US intelligence agencies had prior warning, they just didn't join the dots. How much worse now would this process be with such a tsunami of data-mined intelligence?
In summary, it's good to see at least a semblance of democratic oversight being played out in the USA, post-Snowden. It is a shame that such a democratic debate is not being held in the UK, which is now the key enabler of the USA's chronic addiction to electronic surveillance.
However, I fear it is inevitably too little too late. As we have seen through history, the only protection against a slide towards totalitarianism is a free media that allows a free transfer of ideas between people without the need to self-censor. The global US military-security complex is embedded into the DNA of the internet. We cannot rely on the USA to voluntarily hand back the powers it has grabbed; we can only work around them as Brazil has suggested it will do, and as the EU is contemplating.
Other than that, responsibility for our privacy rests in our own hands.
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