That ambition, he noted, "was impossible in the era of mere phone wiretapping, before the recent explosion of electronic communications -- before the cellphones that disclose the whereabouts of their owners, the personal computers with their masses of personal data and easily penetrated defenses, the e-mails that flow through readily tapped cables and servers, the biometrics, the street-corner surveillance cameras. But now, to borrow the name of an intelligence program from the (George W.) Bush years, Total Information Awareness is technologically within reach."
Bush set those efforts in motion, and his successor has extended them. No wonder Obama received such a chilly reception when he visited Germany last summer, a few weeks after the first revelations about NSA spying.
In June, Wolfgang Schmidt, once a lieutenant colonel in the former East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, commented on the NSA's domestic surveillance program, making the disbanded Stasi's work during the 1980s seem tiny and crude in comparison. "For us, this would have been a dream come true," Schmidt told a reporter.
Whatever the reach of government surveillance might be, the standard claims of incorruptibility are nonsense. "It is the height of naivete to think that once collected, this information won't be used," said Schmidt. "The only way to protect the people's privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place."
Today a popular myth is that rapid digital advances make more surveillance inevitable. Technology is a convenient scapegoat for escalating invasions of privacy. But there is nothing inherent in technological progress that requires such violations of human rights and civil liberties.
The overarching problems are not technological; they are political -- and they have to do with who has power, how they got it and what they are doing with it. Democracy is at stake, and, as the Feb. 11 protests indicate, democracy is the potential solution.
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