F*******o
发帖数: 287 | 1 If it were the 1950s and the feds were in cahoots with the phone company to
root out communist spies, it would hardly be an issue. The press might even
choose not to report on it.
Obviously, much has changed since then. Most notably, a sweeping digital rev
olution has given the federal government and other 揹ata minersa vast capa
bility to monitor the behavior of nearly every U.S. citizen. That has produc
ed the mushrooming controversy over the government抯 anti-terrorism scrutiny
of Verizon抯 (VZ) call logs as many as 1 billion phone calls per day pl
us the apparent monitoring of servers operated by the world抯 biggest Intern
et companies, including Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Apple (AAPL) and Micro
soft (MSFT) (which deny cooperating with the government). The Wall Street Jo
urnal reports government surveillance extends to other phone companies, incl
uding AT&T (T) and Sprint Nextel (S), and also includes credit-card transact
ions for millions of Americans.
揑t seems that the government wants to know everywhere we go, everyone we kn
ow, and everything we think,says Reed Hundt, who sits on several corporate
boards and was commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission from 1
993 to 1997. 揟he law says you抮e innocent until proved guilty. Data mining
is based on the opposite principle.br />
Americans have mixed feelings about
their private data getting into corporat
e or government hands, but they have much stronger views about something els
e that makes this whole flap a huge problem for the Obama administration: Th
ey don抰 trust the government. That抯 why the uproar is likely to continue a
nd perhaps even jeopardize legitimate efforts to thwart terrorists.
A momentous change
One of the most momentous changes of modern times has been a sharp drop in A
mericansconfidence in institutions. In the mid 1980s, for instance, 40% of
Americans said they had confidence in Congress, according to Gallup. That抯
now at a near-record low of 13%. Confidence in the presidency has fallen fr
om 72% in 1991 to 37%. A separate poll by Pew found that 53% of Americans sa
y the federal government threatens their personal freedom, the highest numbe
r in the 18 years Pew has been asking the question.
Government isn抰 the only institution Americans view more skeptically. Gallu
p抯 data show that trust in banks, big business, the media, organized religi
on and the public school system has eroded as well. Americans have become le
ss trusting for a number of reasons, including nonstop partisan squabbling i
n Washington, dubious programs such as the 2008 TARP bailouts, and a stagnan
t economy that has degraded living standards, which nobody in charge seems a
ble to do much about.
Policymakers in Washington have been trying to reassure the public about the
government抯 far-reaching surveillance programs, insisting they are narrow,
carefully monitored, and effective at spotting and stopping terrorists. 揈v
eryone should just calm down,Democratic Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Maj
ority Leader, said. 揟his isn't anything that is brand new, it's been going
on for some seven years, and we have tried often to make it better.br />
Reid
might be right that such surveillance isn抰 such a big deal but who t
rusts Harry Reid, one of the leaders of an institution recently deemed less
popular than cockroaches, traffic jams and Donald Trump? Republicans defend
the surveillance program, too, but the GOP rates even lower than Democrats a
mong the public, and suffers from an overall image that 搒tands at one of th
e lowest points in nearly two decades,according to Pew.
It gets sketchier. The surveillance program is carried out by the National S
ecurity Agency, one of the government抯 most secretive bodies. To obtain the
legal warrants and other approvals needed to do what it does, the NSA appea
ls to a secret court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, who
se proceedings are classified. For some reason, this court supposedly dedi
cated to foreign intelligence gathering has ruled that domestic surveillan
ce of Americans, by their own government, is perfectly fine. But we抮e not a
llowed to know why.
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