So, we can read any number of analyses--on this board, or http://www.nytimes.com/... wherever you prefer to go, and it's all about whether Obama is going far enough, or not going far enough. And it's all a big lie. Privacy advocates congratulate themselves if they think they got something, or whine that they didn't get enough. And everyone is missing the elephant in the room....
That elephant is the fact that nothing has been done to stop our data being recorded, hoarded, and crunched. That's because the hoarding is not done by the NSA, it is done by a bunch of corporations. NSA just gets them to hand it all over. Those corporations have been waiting to see if they would be let off the hook. Let's be clear: They don't really care about NSA snooping through their files on us. They have never cared about our privacy. Their business models depend, in fact, on our lack of interest in privacy. Their whining about how NSA has compromised their customers' privacy is a huge red herring.
No, they are only concerned with one thing: The impact the bad PR will all have on their ability to go on collecting our data. They are afraid of European governments making it harder for them to go about their business.
So we pat ourselves and Edward Snowden on the back, and go home to Facebook, where our personal profiles are being vacuumed up for future consumption. Do we really think we are safer? Forget about whether it is ok for Facebook to compile profiles on us. Are we really so stupid as to think that in some future "emergency", the laws restricting NSA will protect us? If anyone believes that, I have a police state to sell you.
The only way to gain even a small measure of protection is to make the data gathering process more transparent. There is a petition to do that:
http://petitions.moveon.org/...
Please consider signing it and passing it along for others to sign.
Thanks to all,