Our government has been surprisingly transparent lately

[cthulu2016]

Whether what Snowden did was right or wrong, benign or deadly, one thing that we can all agree on (or should be able to) is that our government has been vastly more open about NSA surveillance recently.

It appears that Yahoo will get their wish that certain secret-court decisions be declassified. I imagine Google will eventually settle their suit with the government releasing secret-court rulings regarding Google.

The president said we should have a conversation about vast government surveillance... which is funny because that conversation could have been had at any point. It's not like the government had to wait for a leaker to spill the beans before admitting things existed about which a free society ought have a conversation.

All around, we are being invited, as citizens, to look at things and consider things that nobody would admit (on the record) even existed.

The government is not actually enjoying a change of heart. The "conversation" is forced because the stuff is out there. Even if it has not been released it may be, and the government would rather get first crack at spinning it.

(We are in that phase of serious talk about our marriage that often comes only right after an affair is exposed. But folks seldom expose the affair unilaterally for the good it will do their marriage. Funny how that works.)

[treestar]

1. The government has a lot of agencies other than NSA

And the weird thing is, that NSA, or CIA, are the very agencies we would not expect to be so transparent.

If transparency were the issue, that's hardly the agency to go after.

[Scuba]

2. Not on purpose.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. Like a pebble thrown in a pond. The ripples are sprading around the world despite the resistance.

[Pholus]

4. If you're looking at vast amounts of data like Facebook, Twitter and Google

it only stands to reason that some of the analysis that gets done is public perception. This may be a reaction to a non-winning issue. Make some positive noises, show a few cards, and hope it blows over quickly.

Finding out that the information is being used without attribution to the original dragnet that collected it in prosecutions would seem to be a large problem for the "rule of law" and the rights of the accused:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/us/double-secret-surveillance.html

And yeah, we're told that it's restricted to "terrorists" right now. But I always keep in mind that particular definition has been stretched to include an 82 year old nuclear weapon protesting nun so I am not sure the USG and I would agree on what the word actually means.