Raiding people’s lives

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

– Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution

…they’ll flip the switch [and] say that because of the crisis – because of the dangers that we face in the world – some new and unpredicted threat – “We need more authority, we need more power.”. And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it, and it will be turnkey tyranny.

– Edward Snowden

“… you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work, against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But If you realize that that’s the world you helped create, and its going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decision about how that’s applied.”

– Edward Snowden speaking with a reporter about the risk to his own life by publicly disclosing the NSA’s data collection activities

The notion that we ought to be grateful because the government is “only” collecting our telecommunications metadata is creepy, dystopian and grovellingly servile.

– Chase Madar, from article “The Passion of Edward Snowden“

What he did was an act of treason.

– U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein

Personal data and communication being gathered and archived into storage by the government is an unreasonable search and seizure.

There are people in the world who have the ability to raid people’s lives. Once there is justification they can do what they want.

I fully believe that, in addition to raiding the information and communications of a person’s life people with these powers can and do actively harass and intimidate their targets. One can easily think of people like the most twisted people you see on Faux News, sitting in cubicles somewhere with access to this information on people’s lives, going into indignant rages at the content of people’s personal communications and, out of bigotry and intolerance harassing them in various ways.

One frightening thing is, as Mr. Snowden said, there is virtually no real, meaningful oversight. So what is to stop these things from happening? Are we supposed to trust that some person in a cubicle with the ability or desire to raid our personal life has the same basic values we do and will not take the information in a twisted manner and do inexcusable things?

As Mr. Snowden said, all this creepy stuff is only regulated to varying extent by policy, not by law. Not by conscious, volitional choice of the people. That is a slippery slope and it is completely at odds with what America has always stood for since its inception.

I’ve been watching some follow-up video of the interviewer, Mr. Greenwald, who is taking apart the responses that we are hearing from high-level officials. We can see in the responses the same delusion over and over and fundamental avoidance of the prime issue of freedom involved.

What is happening right now with the infrastructure of oppression is extremely sick. The infrastructure of oppression is creating a state of oppression and classes of those with privileges who can raid and invade the private lives of others with impunity.

The internet is on principle a system that you reveal yourself to in order to fully enjoy, which differentiates it from, say, a music player. It is a TV that watches you. The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.

– Edward Snowden in correspondence with reporter