[WS:] What is possible is not necessarily probable. You did not see lefties being rounded up and railroaded to camps by the Bush administration. It takes far more for that to happen than simple information gathering. And to be honest, if that were about to happen, information gathering would be the least of our concerns. I can come with a plausible scenario - security is lax, there is another high profile terrorist attack, the fascists demand the martial law, there is a bipartisan support and large public demand (not necessarily manufactured, just properly amplified by the corporate media) for it, and bingo - here go your constitutional amendment rights. You can be railroaded to a gulag on an administrative order (just like the Japanese were in WW2) without any factual information to justify this move. While such things did happen in the past, I do not think they are likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
That is why I am trying to be rational here and find a reasonable balance between security - which is badly needed because there are people out there who are very determined to hurt us by any means - and civil rights including that for a due process - which are equally important. Thus far, the current administrations seem to strike such balance.
Please also note that I use the concept of civil rights and due process rather than privacy. The latter is laden with bourgeois connotations and values, a chief of which is "limited government." The former, otoh, implies government and legal system actively protecting rights of citizens.
The difference is not just semantic connotations, but real outcomes. A great deal of discrimination has been going on in this country under the claim of privacy. If these claims were respected, we would still have an apartheid society. And if you still see some vestiges of that apartheid
it is because of privacy considerations, not because of active government.
What rubs me a wrong way in this whole debate about NSA spying is the hysterical reaction it provoked. I smell a rat in the woodpile when I think how this whole thing came about. A low level schmuck having access to all kinds of highly classified information and then risk his life for no apparent gain and flee to Hong Kong and freely give interviews to a major newspaper about that information? Something does not add up here. If I were to bet my money, I would say that there was someone much more senior behind it, and Snowden was just a useful libertarian idiot fronting the operation and probably had some guarantees that nothing bad will happen to him, his voice will be heard, and he will get his reward in due time. In other words, swift boat captains redux. Now, it is one thing to have an opinion about Obama's policies (FYI, mine is not that favorable) and a rather different thing to fall for political maneuvers against his administration that come straight from the fascist textbook.
In this context, the hysterical reaction of many lefties and liberals is not just ridiculous, but dangerous. It is ridiculous because it is a delusion of grandeur of piss ants who think they are on a big dog hunt, while in reality, they do not count and NSA has better things to do than wasting money on monitoring their kvetching. It is dangerous, because it creates an illusion of grassroot support to something that appears to a false flag operation launched by arch-reactionary forces. Let me make a guess here - the public outcry may result in shutting down or scaling down of the NSA operation. Then, the next time there is a high profile terrorist attack (which is the question of when rather than whether), the swift boat captains reappear and start blaming liberals and fellow travelers for gutting national security and calling for tough emergency measures. And guess what - they get an overwhelming popular and bipartisan support, while the liberals and lefties would no even know what hit them.
It worked in the past, and chances are it will not fail working again.
When I see Republicans jumping on a bandwagon with ACLU and fellow travelers to protect "privacy" an old New Yorker cartoon comes to mind in which a cat is pulling a little mouse in a kiddie wagon, and another mouse says "Think! Why is he so nice to you?"
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."