Prism

[poliphilo]

I'm not surprised. When did any Government- on ethical or legal grounds- refuse to use the powers available to it? The American- and British- governments thought they could get away with rifling through our private correspondence so they did. Governments- all governments- are paranoid and amoral.

If America were the Frank Capra movie it likes to think it is the whistle-blower would be riding in a motorcade through showers of ticker-tape. As it is, he's seeking political asylum in Hong Kong.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I think that more and more people are adding up the scandals and recognizing that it's out of control and, moreover, that it's not a Your Party vs My Party thing but totally the people vs their overlords.

[algabal.livejournal.com]

The grossest part of the whole thing are the many, many Americans jumping up and down in eagerness to announce just how much they don't care that their own government spies on them constantly.

Another thing that disturbs me is the lack of reaction from the international community. They're spying on everything you folks in Canada, Japan, the UK, South Africa, etc. do, and handing it over to the US government to place in a massive database. Isn't that deeply disturbing and offensive to people outside the US?

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

It's a wretched state of affairs. True, there's a fair amount of this that's been known to some degree before this set of revelations, but it's remained relatively below the public's radar, for whatever reasons - Room 641A in a San Francisco telco facility, amongst other things. Here, though, we've got solid confirmation of just how dreadfully widespread that scheme (and it's far from alone, eg Stellar Wind) is, alongside specific names, collectively amounting to sizeable chunks of people's everyday interactions on the net - Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al.

And true to everybody's expectations, the UK govt's first reaction was to issue a D Notice, now joined by Cameron proclaiming that You Have Nothing To Fear. (It'll be interesting to see just how identical Clegg and Miliband's responses will be - I can't imagine for a moment that every senior figure isn't perfectly and completely on board with such universal surveillance, now that the differences between the parties have more or less melted with the snows)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes.

There is a ruling elite. The faces at the top change but the policies remain the same. Obama simply continues where Bush left off.

The same is true over here. Blair modelled himself on Thatcher and Cameron models himself on Blair. Party differences that once meant something now mean nothing at all.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suspect the lack of reaction is because we already knew this was going on. I'll admit my reaction to the revelations was, "And you call that News?"

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Hague tried to laugh it all off in a TV interview. It made me want to punch his lights out.