From NYRB, Kenneth Roth on rethinking surveillance; and Aryeh Neier on spying on Americans: A very old story. An interview with Cesar Hidalgo on what your e-mail habits reveal. We call it TMI but philosopher Anita Allen thinks it might be something else as well: unethical. If everyone has something to hide, then it’s not surveillance that is the problem: As we move into a world with less privacy, we are going to need fewer and more lenient laws, or else society will grind to a halt. Timothy B. Lee on what can go wrong when the government builds a huge database about Americans. Stephen J. Schulhofer on what’s really at stake in the NSA data sweeps. Conor Friedersdorf on the problem with the “privacy moderates”. Hendrik Hertzberg on the NSA, the “encroaching police state”, and the system. Pratap Bhanu Mehta on how Snowden’s revelations highlight the moral decline of America. There is a new agency in Washington that is working to make sure the government’s anti-terrorism efforts do not ride roughshod over Americans’ civil liberties. The doubters are wrong: Edward Snowden is a game-changer. From In These Times, Louis Nayman writes in defense of PRISM: By delegitimizing the government, the Left is doing the Tea Party’s dirty work; and where will the next generation of Americans draw the line on surveillance? Lynn Stuart Parramore on 6 insidious ways surveillance changes the way we think and act.
