The Declaration of Independence states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Gendered language aside, the idea of the founders was clearly that rights derive from one's innate humanity, and do <i>not</i> derive from government largess. This was the ideal which provided America's inner light; for all of America's mis-steps, the proclamation of this core ideal fanned the flames of some sort of tendency towards goodness.<p>This ideal is all but gone. Today, the American government baldly proclaims that rights do not belong to human beings, but are conferred only by citizenship. the starkest example of this remains John Yoo's rationale (embraced by the Bush administration) for why the Geneva Convention does not apply to the Taliban: that the rights guaranteed by the Convention were not <i>human</i> rights, but rights granted to combatants of UN member states. Yoo argued that human rights did not exist, and that rights derive solely from citizenship.<p>To be fair, the roots of that doctrine long preceded the Bush administration, and have continue to grow since. But when I look at framing of debate about rights -- and this applies not only to the NSA spying, but also to the outrage over the fact that the US President would order the drone assassination of, gasp, <i>American citizens</i> (as opposed to the thousands of other non-combatants he has killed in the same way) -- when I see this, it becomes clear that the ideals which inspired the declaration of independence are long since gone.
I was going to write a comment to this effect on one of the many threads related to this subject, but figured it would fall on deaf ears.<p>Americans should not underestimate the damage this scandal has done to the American 'brand'. Growing up, I was the Americophile of my friends. I loved American culture, I aspired to live the American dream, I fully intended to pursue American citizenship later in life.<p>This is only the latest in a long line of realisations, but my view couldn't have changed more. I don't even want to visit the US again, let alone pledge my allegiance to it.
That's one thing that has annoyed me about the tech world's outrage and objections to the PRISM spying lark. They appear outraged that US citizens are spied on, with the implication that it was ok when non us citizens were spied on. Do I, a non us citizen, not have a right to privacy?
I totally agree, I have been watching this totally pointless discussion about domestic spying all over the net. I was going to write about the topic, but someone did it already. My conclusion is that at least 95% of US population are so bad in geography that they don't know that they represent only less than 5% of world population. After all, it seems that only people who are voting in elections do matter at all. Maybe it would be a good time to vote with our wallets. It's also really funny how scared Americans are about Chinese manufactured hardware & backdoors. I just guess it takes a one to know one. Btw. WatchGuard firewall registration is very revealing, they want to know way too much about what the firewall is being used for.
The other dangerous thing about this attitude of, oh, it's only foreigners, is that GCHQ and other US allies routinely sweep up communications from all over the world (in the case of GCHQ probably mostly from the US). So if you send information to Europe from the US, you're being spied upon, and the information relayed back to the NSA. The same goes for citizens of the UK subject to NSA spying who have data or contacts in the US. This distinction between us and them is used to tranquillise dissent in the US even as the NSA blithely ignores their own rules.<p>In our increasingly connect world, does it even make sense to define rights based on where a person lives, or what country they happened to be born in? We should expect the same basic rights (right to a free trial, right to a free press, protection from torture) to apply to all people even if citizenship of a nation confers certain privileges.
The sad thing is, we don't have international law for these things. Thus, it is usually easier to ask a foreign intelligence agency if they could spy on a domestic suspect than to deal with it within the country.<p>And this hurts so much, because the internet is perceived to not be bound by countries and borders, while still residing mostly on US soil. But the rules for spying are most certainly governed by borders; This leads to this weird asymmetric situation where one particular domestic intelligence agency is able to collect almost all international data.<p>What we really would need is citizenship for data. In a way, it does not make sense that Facebook owns my data. My data should be my own, and thus be governed by whatever jurisdiction I happen to live in.<p>Or put differently, one way out of this is to host your own email, backup, syncing, etc. That way the data is <i>yours</i>, and governed by the same rules as you. This is what I am doing.<p>Or maybe, Google should split up into several legal entities that each are accountable for the data for one country. But clearly, that would just leave us all flocking to Iceland or the Vatican or something like that...
I went to this expecting to find a slightly puzzled reaction along the lines of, "even given the leaked surveillance, we all know that our own governments are doing similar stuff to us all the time and that we are protected neither by law nor by convention against it".<p>I know that's a bit of an overstatement but it's particularly amusing to see Snowden sheltered by two of the world's most enthusiastic users of surveillance, namely Russia and China.<p>FWIW I'm in the UK, where we're a lot luckier than most in terms of accountability, oversight and convention, but don't have an explicit constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. That said, it often bemuses people in Europe to look at the US and see almost no protection for what we understand as a basic right of "privacy".
This outrage at American reactions is terribly hypocritical. Yes, people -- regardless of nationality -- <i>should</i> be upset when they realize their privacy is being grossly violated without cause, by <i>any</i> government.<p>However, people seem to think Americans should be more concerned about <i>other people's rights</i> than their own, when the real problem is the violation of <i>everyone's</i> rights. Despite this, all anyone is really interested is <i>their own rights</i>, which is quite obvious considering the central complaint here is that Americans are wrapped up in themselves while the rest of the world has the same issue. How is that rational? Your rights are being violated, and that's supposed to matter <i>to me</i> more than the fact that <i>my</i> rights are being violated by <i>my government</i> in the same way? Yes, it's selfish, but it's also self-preservation. If people don't stand up for themselves when they need to, they will not be around to stand up for anyone else later.<p>Many of us wring our hands at the various European financial crises; many of us worry about North Korea's potential to harm its neighbors; many of us anxiously watch for improvement in Middle Eastern politics. But just like anyone else, when we find out things <i>where we live</i> are worse than we thought, we look inwards to our own problems; that they effect others is terrible, but it's irrational and unreasonable to expect that to be our primary motivation.
Nothing will change until <i>all</i> Americans get it once and for all that the attitude of being <i>at war with the world and planning to win at all cost</i> is actually <i>opposite</i> to <i>being competitive and fighting hard to be the best in the world.</i><p>We the foreigners that buy into the american dream always think of the latter as the "american attitude" whereas US gov and corporations always go for the first. And they only coincide in very restricted contexts, basically in fewer and fewer contexts as the world changes and becomes more homogeneous. To "win the war" when you're well above everyone else tends to equate to playing fair most of the time, you just use what you have and what you have is always better so you always win, but when the economical and cultural ground levels, if your goal is still to "win the war", you end up playing dirty and forgetting about human rights and values.<p>...the USA's attitude will only change when they wake tf up and realize that <i>there is now war</i> to be won, it's just about competing in a healthy "jungle". The current US gov's attitude to everything seems to us foreigners similar to your classical story of the PTSDd Vietnam war veteran that gets home after the war and keeps fighting imaginary wars, butchering his family and blowing up the neighborhood in the process, just because that's all he's good at.
Yes but this is happening in other countries for both citizens and non-citizens, it is naive to think otherwise. Just as it was for Americans after 9/11, and even before. If there is lack of backbone on the people to stop it and they allow giving up rights with no fight or questioning it, it will continue. It is not distinct to the US, this is happening everywhere.<p>Now we know factually (previously assumed) that it happens in the US as well, I think most people here in the US are just surprised it is also happening to them. That was the last place people assumed privacy, as a citizen. You'd expect intel agencies in every country to gather as much information as possible unless the people of that country object loud enough, I am not for it at all but it is the new game.<p>I am sure this is also happening at gov't levels all over the world in addition to private companies. Business ideas and data stolen everyday, gov't intelligence agencies sifting right off the lines.<p>The age of digital privacy just seems to be over sadly, too many technology tools to not abuse out there. Changing it will be difficult, encryption doesn't even help. Personal servers, computers etc are the easiest thing to get into. The only real protection would be at the service/cloud level and having stronger security/monitoring like financial + trading markets have. But then you have the situation where gov't intel agencies just go to them to gain access. Not even sure how to change it. Explicit protections in the Constitution are footnoted away with executive orders and fear based legislation.<p>The permanent record your teachers used to warn you about, that exists now for real.
I see a lot of disillusion in Europe about the US. It's been going since the Iraq, but now it's a real wake up call. What's more alarming, it's slipping into anger and open opposition. This is not the <i>change</i> we've been anticipating.<p>Americans are in a tricky situation now. Who do you elect at this point to make things right? Does it even work? I think we've reached a major milestone here. I'm both frightened and curious as to what will happen. I believe what we do now will define our lives for decades to come.
As an Australian this is exactly how I feel. Over the past few weeks I've been moving many of my business systems off the cloud and onto self hosted servers and using less and less American servers because they clearly have no issue with taking foreigners information and with tens of thousands of contractors and employees able to access that information I wonder how long it's going be before big companies are able to effectively spy on competitors through having a 'friend' with access to prism.
> we all bought into the dream..<p>The American dream didn't even work out for most US citizens. Merely the upper class. The rest of the world bought into practical consumerism more than into a diffuse dream.
Just to put it out there, while I agree that the sheer volume of snooping being performed by the NSA, why is it a surprise to anyone, anywhere, that any government is snooping on as much foreign traffic as they can? This is, and has pretty much always been, standard operating procedure for every major intelligence agency in the world.
What hurts me is that people are acting surprised that spy agencies are spying on people. Their job is to collect intelligence. If they <i>can</i> read your emails, they will.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies</a>
Practically speaking, context matters in privacy. For instance, if a person invades my privacy to learn my sexual orientation, I would feel violated. But if that person was my boss, I would feel much more violated.<p>For an American like myself, domestic spying is scary for the same reason. The US government is my local government. They run our children's schools. They make me send in reams of silly tax documents. They make me wait in line at the DMV. They patrol the streets of my neighborhood with guns. When I call 911 (the emergency number), it's the US government who answers. In short, the US government -- my government -- is in a great position to abuse the knowledge gained from spying. It's this immediacy that heightens fear of domestic spying.<p>Another thing to note is that there is a subtle but important distinction for Americans between the CIA and the FBI. The connotative equivalent of the FBI is the police and the connotative equivalent of the CIA is the army. Thus, watching the CIA spy on Americans feels ominous and sinister. It's the spying equivalent of martial law.<p>What Americans don't realize, I think, is that for foreigners it is an issue of respect. That is, the underlying context of domestic spying outrage is that US citizens were _not_ outraged by foreign spying; that it's perfectly acceptable to spy on the foreigners as long as we protect our own privacy.<p>In the end, privacy is about perception. To those who, like me, feel their privacy is being violated, please continue to make your feelings heard, both inside and outside the US. The more voices (especially tenacious ones) the better.
The way the US talks about non-citizens has convinced me more and more of my (rather controversial) opinion that in order to have rule of law, we need <i>one legal system</i> for the whole world. I am skeptical of the idea of a world government, of course - it would have too much power, but I do think that governments need to be put on trial as frequently as citizens, in an international court system. I've blogged about this before[1], although I intend to rewrite much of what's on that old site since I don't think it's communicated very well.<p>I will (when time allows) be stopping my use of American cloud services one by one as a result of this scandal. Gmail, Dropbox, and so on. It will take a while for me to write/borrow my own implementations, and self host them, so that all my stuff works the same way (or similar enough). It was nice while it lasted, but I'm now going to <i>have</i> to start taking my skepticism of US law seriously, and avoid coming into contact with it where ever I can.<p>[1] <a href="http://politicomaniac.net/category/internationalism/" rel="nofollow">http://politicomaniac.net/category/internationalism/</a>
Why so black and white? US vs the rest? I don't care about what government says or does something, I care about what people do to each other, because in the end we are all people. It is not ok for a group of people to take it upon themselves to hurts everybody's privacy like has been done now. We'd have to stop whoever is doing this.
Ugh! I cringed reading that.<p><i>We wear blue jeans, drink Coke & eat McDonalds. We favor American companies (hands down) when we make purchases</i><p>Well, thanks, but as an American I'd rather if people didn't have this subservient attachment to the U.S.
> George Bush famously proclaimed: “You’re either with us, or against us”. He asked foreigners the world over to choose. The wholesale spying on “foreigners” says how we chose made little difference at all..<p>Maybe we should just create the "terrorist party", as in, we are all terrorist in the eyes of the US, so we might just have to get comfortable with the label.
I'd argue that there are several countries that are more free than the United States in both terms of social issues and economics that make better role models.<p>This might all be 'news' to the tech community - but Libertarian circles have been talking about this trend towards totalitarianism since what, the 70s? It might feel like it all started after 9/11, but this framework has been building up for decades. In fact, it's the natural trajectory to unopposed empire.<p>The only thing I hope is that foreign nations accept us liberty loving Americans into their arms when the expatriation wave begins and are able to distinguish us from the assholes. It's coming - just look at the uptick in expatriation: www.nestmann.com/expatriation-statistics There's even publications dedicated to this like www.sovereignman.com and www.escapefromamerica.com/about
Perhaps it's because I'm Canadian and have lived in a world of "constantly aware of US politics but not governed by them" but I find the attitude the OP is now discarding to be superbly and painfully naive. Basically delusional. Imagine the feeling you would get when someone tells you "I entered by credit card number in that 'check if your credit card has been stolen' banner ad and it said I was safe, so that's good news". Same feeling.<p>So while I'm glad the realization has been had, and the childish notion has been discarded, I'm really worried that this is some kind of common idea among educated non-Americans. Is the ability to read newspapers or follow politics (actual politics, not the circus of party politics) of any kind in that much of a decline?
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), Woody Guthrie:<p>[...]<p>The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,<p>A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,<p>Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?<p>The radio says, "They are just deportees"<p>Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?<p>Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?<p>To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil<p>And be called by no name except "deportees"?<p>This is some time after 1948. Then, just as now, there were people who saw non-citizens as barely humans, in the US and everywhere else. But then there was Woody Guthrie as well, and the many people like him who saw the human in the foreigner.<p>What has changed in recent years is the reach of the mightiest power, and sheer number of people who find ourselves in the wrong end of its struggle for control.
This is going to be a little inflammatory but it's true.<p>Why I will never take seriously foreigners' reactions to our wars, surveillance, human rights violations, etc:<p>You people, and the governments and central banks who represent you, keep buying our debt and financing all of this. The US Government would be incapable of funding these programs and wars at low cost without YOU stepping up to the plate <i>every single auction</i> to buy up our treasuries at ridiculously low yields.<p>I'll believe your outrage when I see action behind it.
Many in "our" community assign a fair amount of credence to the statement: Information is power.<p>We see the trend. A... -- I seldom haul out this word, but I will now -- "neo-Fascist" [1] regime absorbing a potentially exponential increase in information while seeking to increasingly restrict our access to and control over same.<p>That is, I think, in good part what it boils down to.
Foreign citizens have a very powerful ally when being spied on by the U.S. government: your own government. When the U.S. government is spying on its own citizens, who do we have to turn to?