Not So Amazing

So this Snowden NSA leak thing won't go away.  Surprising, since , as I said previously, the story doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, nor could have guessed.  A mixture of technology and post-9/11 paranoia greatly increased government surveillance. 

Even some of the claimed effects of the leak are hardly dramatic.  We've been told that terrorists have changed their behaviours based on the information about how surveillance has apparently worked.  For instance, they've stopped using Skype since it was mentioned as a company that worked with the NSA.  Don't worry: any terrorists that assume any communications medium is safe unless they've heard otherwise are not worth worrying about.  Among the things we didn't learn from Snowden's revelations is any evidence of new technology that we didn't already know about, so terrorist with a reasonable knowledge of information technology was already avoiding the media being monitored.

 

The most interesting aspect of the story has been the strange bedfellows it has produced:

• Republicans have had to come to the defence of Obama and big government, lest they be seen as soft on terror.
• Democrats have had to defend the War On Terror, because Obama can't afford another scandal.
• Europeans have fallen out of love with Obama, after seeing him come to the defence of the U.S. government's us-vs.-them attitude.
• People who are critical of government surveillance have been quick to throw Snowden himself under the bus upon seeing the public's largely negative reaction to his actions.

Really there have only been a couple of new things that came out of the leak:

• We're having the public rescission about surveillance, privacy and security that we should have had a decade ago.
• Privacy advocates are learning just how far they have to go in winning over the public.