Jesse Brown considers the numbers and sentiment behind headlines
Edward Snowden (AP Photo/The Guardian)
The U.S. Congress has voted to let the NSA continue to spy on Americans, but the headlines don’t tell the whole story.
It’s true that last night in the House of Representatives an amendment was defeated that would have put an end to the National Security Agency’s bulk phone metadata collection, limiting the spying to those suspected of terrorism.
Here are some other truths:
My takeaway? Americans have had enough — a message their representatives are starting to appreciate. The next Congressional elections are in 2014. I believe yesterday’s narrow loss will encourage pro-privacy voices, whereas a narrow victory may have placated them.
The PRISM phone metadata program is just one of many NSA domestic spying regimes: there’s Stellar Wind, a bulk email data-snooping scheme, ShellTrumpet, which has harvested more than 1 trillion pieces of Internet metadata, and EvilOlive, which collects bulk web traffic. Ambitious Congressional candidates with their eyes on younger voters will do well to bang drums against such efforts, all of which were revealed by Edward Snowden, who, as I write, remains confined to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
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