I'm always worried about discouraging people with the pessimistic view here, but it's not actually clear to me that we have a choice in that matter. Most innoc

I'm always worried about discouraging people with the pessimistic view here, but it's not actually clear to me that we have a choice in that matter. Most innocently, because the number of people worried about this remains relatively low, and regularly gets overwhelmed by other groups. That's how democracy works, obviously, but it alarms me because privacy is a partially unrecoverable resource; even if people organize and win, a great deal of damage may have been done. More cynically, though, because it feels like many of our democratic systems don't work on this problem. By its own admission, the CIA violated its charter - and in many cases federal law - numerous times from the 1950s to 1970s. These events were documented internally in 1973, but no one appears to have faced consequences, and the "Family Jewels" weren't publicly released until 2007. Also in the 1970s, the Church Committee concluded that the NSA had conducted illegal surveillance, failed to shut it down when instructed to do so, and then followed up by lying to Congress about the entire mess. It also concluded that no one could be prosecuted for this, essentially because the tracks had been covered too well to convict any specific individual. The history of other Five Eyes nations in not substantially more comforting, as a look at e.g. UK practice in Northern Ireland will testify. Today, the state of privacy law in the US isn't even known, because much of it is decided in secret court hearings with no one but the government present. National Security Letters help ensure that the public can't object to state surveillance by forcing private citizens to keep it secret, and interfering with basic access to counsel for the recipients. James Clapper gave testimony to Congress that was prima facie perjury, for which he faced no consequences. The list goes on at enormous and alarming length. I don't know what we do about this. Voting for candidates who oppose war and surveillance is good, but they generally perform poorly, the ones who do well often seem to reverse course after election, and the ones who follow through (like Wyden and Udall) are frequently stonewalled and outright lied to by intelligence services. It feels alarmingly like we've created a surveillance system which operates independent of any democratic decisionmaking, and no longer know how to walk it back.