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| This is for your own protection. |
This post is for you if you’ve been trying to tell people
about the problem of ubiquitous government surveillance for years and you have
been roundly ignored or laughed at.
You’ve been telling people about the NSA and government and wiretapping
and spying and the PATRIOT act and the NDAA for years. You were called a conspiracy theorist by all
your Republican friends throughout the Bush era and you’ve been called one by
your Democratic friends since 2008. You
have posted news items relating to government surveillance and received zero
feedback; no one seems to believe you or care to find out if you’re
correct. You’ve felt like the only sane
person in a world full of apathetic crazy people for years and years, and you
are goddamn tired of it.
And then suddenly, today, the Guardian reported on a leaked
top secret government document authorizing
the collection of “meta-data” from every single domestic Verizon Wireless
customer. Later on, more documents
were dropped: turns out the government isn’t just monitoring Verizon users, but
users of 9
major internet services, including Apple, Google and Facebook.
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| Source |
And the internet exploded.
Suddenly, everyone you know is upset about the exact thing you’ve been trying to warn them
about for years. And you’re tearing
your hair out, because now they
care? Now, 12 years after the PATRIOT act? The Atlantic describes these reports as “Bombshells”,
Politico describes it as “Insane”. You’ve been describing it to everyone for
years, and the only thing people have been describing as insane is you.
Right now, you have a burning and completely understandable
desire to explode right back on the exploding internet with the most justified
“I fucking TOLD YOU SO” of your entire life.
I hear you. I don’t
blame you.
I am here to ask you not to do that.
What the internet hears when you say “I told you so”, when
you remind people that this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, is that this
isn’t really news. That it’s been going
on for years, and that it’s normal. The
natural conclusion to draw from these kinds of assertions is that this isn’t
that big of a deal. It’s safe to stop
being angry. We always lived in this
kind of world, this world is normal, and everything is OK.
But everything is not OK.
I have little hope of anything changing as a result of these
public revelations. But if they do
change, it will be because people are surprised and furious and outraged as
only a scandal can make them. When you
tell them that this is not a scandal but old news then you are diffusing that
precious, righteous rage, and you are acting contrarily to your original aim in
attempting to educate them on the dangers of government surveillance in the
first place.
Instead of reacting to this sudden outpouring of rage with justified
irritation, consider taking advantage of it.
Point people to additional sources of information. My wise and incredibly tolerant fiancé has
been referring people to James Bamford’s fantastic
trilogy on the history of the NSA, which outlines the organization’s long
history of pushing the envelope of the fourth amendment and steadily moving our
concept of what constitutes unconstitutional surveillance farther and farther
away from our constitutional starting point.
Urge your friends to take action and express
their outrage in letters to their congressmen. There are probably more ways to take
advantage of this moment, and these ways will be the things that matter.
Those of us who are concerned about the extreme dangers
poised by ubiquitous government surveillance need to feed the flame of popular
outrage.
If that means swallowing our pride, so be it.
