Comment by kbart
12 years ago
What strikes me most reading NSA related articles, that for Americans the problem here is not the global surveillance itself, but the domestic spying. Wtf? Is my anonymity and freedom less valuable just because I don't have a USA signed piece of paper? It's a serious problem that touches everyone who uses digital communications (pretty much every human being on the word nowadays)and such data collection should be illegal on anyone unless he's under a warrant or belongs to opposite forces during war times. I'm very sad and disappointed that EU leaders don't have balls to stand up for this.
I agree that non-US-citizens are endowed with the same fundamental human rights, including the right to privacy, as US citizens.
However: 1) US citizens alone control the US government's actions, at least indirectly and in theory. NSA's domestic spying presents a threat to our democratic processes. NSA spying on US citizens is more dangerous than if they spied only on non-citizens, because it provides the NSA the means to control their ostensible masters--making any reforms to NSA's foreign surveillance operations impossible.
2) In realpolitik terms, most Americans simply do not think or care about foreigners. Any bill that ends NSA's authority to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreigners is a non-starter in our current Congress. By first ending NSA's domestic surveillance programs, we actually have a shot at eventually ending NSA's unethical foreign dragnet surveillance programs. In other words: baby steps.