"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." Mahatma Gandhi
I want to observe that in the struggle to bring to light and end the massive spying the NSA has engaged in, we have gone beyond ignore and ridicule to fight and now to negotiate. We now have reached the stage where the government is figuring out how much they have to do, or be seen as doing, to make the outcry go away. We can expect that we will hear about some sort of reforms to the NSA and the FISA courts coming from the White House in the next few weeks.
So, beyond the orange wiretap circuitry, I have a question:
Like many of you, my confidence in our government has been profoundly shaken by the revelations of layer upon layer of surveillance, secrecy, deceit and flouting of the principles of democracy our government has been engaged in for the past several years. I am asking myself, and you, what will the government have to do to really restore confidence that they will uphold our basic human right to privacy? What changes would they have to make for you to say, "Yeah, our government got this for real. These aren't cosmetic changes."?
At the negotiation stage of any social change movement, the danger is that TPTB will engage in cosmetic but very public gestures and attempt to divide and co-opt sections of the movement. That is where I think we are with the NSA question. A specific concern I have is that there will be real changes to surveillance policy and law, but that the NSA's actvities will continue and be driven deeper underground, beyond scrutiny of the White House, Congress, the FISA court, and the rest of us. So how deeply would the agency have to be reformed for that to be impossible?
Now some of you may answer that no measure the government could take would satisfy you that the surveillance state has been brought under control, because you believe that the NSA and its private counterparts have their tentacles so deep into the machinery of government that they can never be dislodged. Perhaps you believe that our privacy, once breached, can never be restored.
I'm not sure I feel this way; perhaps you are right. But if you believe this, and you follow your reasoning through to all its ramifications, and develop a plan of action that will have the best outcome for human history, what does that mean? What would you do?