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On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
[...]
There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.
Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.
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(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:16AM
Actually it is always a trade off. Your freedom to shoot at targets in the direction of my house is trumped by my safety. The freedom to drive through the school bus stop at 50 mph is trumped by the freedom of my child to get safely on the bus. And on and on.
Freedom is important but it is not endless. Shit if the government was trustworthy and capable, I might even agree with the mass surveillance.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday November 19 2015, @04:44PM
Actually it is always a trade off.
When you speak of it this way, you only help the government spread its nonsensical propaganda. They want to pretend there is some nonexistent "balance" that needs to be met, and of course the "balance" is actually unbalanced so that freedom has a lower priority than something shallow like safety.
And if it is a trade off, then I'm perfectly happy trading off safety for freedom, thanks. Technically, I think we can have both, but I am merely making my priorities known.
And on and on.
You might as well say, "Your freedom to shoot me in the head is trumped by my freedom to be safe." But I don't believe in the freedom to shoot people in the head, or the freedom to do many of the crazy things you could come up with, so all of what you said is irrelevant. What I speak of are fundamental liberties like freedom of speech and a government that actually follows the highest law of the land. Safety is shallow and cannot be more important than those things.
Shit if the government was trustworthy and capable, I might even agree with the mass surveillance.
Violating my privacy is bad in and of itself even if the information is never abused in some tangible way. Furthermore, mass surveillance violates the constitution, which I guess you're (maybe) fine with.
So to me, a government that is conducting mass surveillance is a government that is *necessarily* untrustworthy and bad.