Unintended Consequences: How NSA Revelations May Lead To Even More Surveillance 207
Lauren Weinstein writes with a slightly depressing end-of-year prediction. An excerpt: "This then may be the ultimate irony in this surveillance saga. Despite the current flood of protests, recriminations, and embarrassments — and even a bit of legal jeopardy — intelligence services around the world (including especially NSA) may come to find that Edward Snowden's actions, by pushing into the sunlight the programs whose very existence had long been dim, dark, or denied — may turn out over time to be the greatest boost to domestic surveillance since the invention of the transistor."
Economic cost of surveillance (Score:5, Informative)
Boeing lost a $4.5 billion fighter aircraft contract to Saab in Brazil because of the revelations about spying. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-19/nsa-spying-blowback-continues-boeing-loses-brazil-jet-order [zerohedge.com]
Cisco has also seen major losses, and lots of other companies big and small are hurting as well.
The US Constitution may have been put in the shredder, the courts may be rubber stamps for the US version of the STASI, and the Congress may be brain dead along with the DOJ, but now it turns out that all this useless spying has hurt the bottom line of Big Corporate American. You screw these people over, and your government funding is going to be severely impacted.
The NSA and the other alphabet soup spying agencies have hurt the only group in the US with the clout to shut them down. The are going to be backing off big time.
On the individual level, government intelligence insiders are going to discover that they will have a much harder time finding those cushy high paying civilian jobs that they expect to be handed when they leave the government. That's what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you. This could have the biggest impact of all, because the revolving door is a major motivation for the entire system in the first place.
Re:I'm up next (Score:5, Informative)
Coming up on Slashdot, a link to my poorly-written ramblings on my obscure blog of someone you have never heard of.
Ignorant poster is ignorant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Weinstein_(technologist) [wikipedia.org]
Re:TFA is full of crap ! (Score:5, Informative)
... 9/11 occured because intelligence folks thought that wire tapping was good enough...
How can I count the many ways that this is so, so wrong? I know a lot of Americans who feel this way, but it seems to fail to meet the facts as we know them.
There was clear warning. Wire tapping was more than sufficient. [cnn.com]
Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations," April 20
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent," June 23
-- CIA, "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays," July 2
-- CIA, "Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely," August 3
The failure to respond adequately to these warnings was a policy failure by the Bush administration, not an intelligence failure by the U.S. intelligence community.