Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

Expecting the public to be instantly outraged by an injustice is like expecting customers to instantly understand your startup. Sure, your product is awesome, your ideas are great, and you know how to execute. But you still have a long uphill slog ahead of you before people will start giving you money. The vast majority of your market will only buy once they see lots of other people buying.

Similarly, the average person will only get upset about the NSA when they see lots of other people getting upset. A successful political movement involves winning over one influencer at a time, as the evidence slowly builds up. The Watergate scandals took a good two years to play out. Successful anti-war movements have sometimes taken half a decade.

Politics has a surprising amount of momentum. If you want to change something, you may need to spend years exerting a relatively tiny force on a huge object. And like a startup, you need to lay lots of groundwork so that you can take advantage of lucky opportunities.

The only way to survive as a whistleblower is to be anonymous, cover your tracks, leave the organisation, leak credible information with evidence to the right people who will do the right thing with it. Protect your identity at all times.

First, Snowden steals his information from a Microsoft Sharepoint server? What are classified documents doing on a Sharepoint server? What is a Sharepoint server doing inside the network boundary at NSA?

Next, they blew the recovery. If they negotiated with Snowden when he was in Hong Kong, they could have had him stand trial in Hawaii and won easily. Or alternatively, they could have done nothing and waited for Snowden to settle down anonymously in some Hong Kong apartment and arranged for an extraordinary rendition, most likely with the tacit blessing of Hong Kong authorities.

Instead we've had this wild goose chase across the world, including the surreal scene of Snowden stuck in the Moscow International Airport, with Vladimir Putin claiming that Moscow Airport isn't part of Russia.

Now, they're going to harass a journalist? The US press, which normally handles national security issues in close consultation with US authorities, is clearly spooked, with front page stories in both WSJ and NYT. There's an old adage: never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

The general public, which didn't care, is now bombarded by increasingly fantastical news stories with just enough entertainment juice to keep them interesting: super-spies reading your email, a lone hacker with a model for a girlfriend fleeing Hawaii to galavant around the world, and the invincible United States seemingly flummoxed at every turn.

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but what the fuck guys? Have we really never considered how to exfil someone from a hostile nation?

Is this really the best our intelligence community can do? If so, the real danger is less 1984 and more kindergarten cops. Maybe the story is more complex from the inside, but if not, this is being botched from end to end.

Like it or not but a lot of non-American users see these actions like a bid to take over the Internet. It is a sort of waging a war against the rest of the world. Treating ordinary citizens from outside America default as terrorists and subjecting 'em to round-the-clock surveillance is a gross violation of human rights.

Why is the world silent on this? Why do I read 'only American citizens deserve privacy' in every piece of debate and discussion out there?

IMO, a historic equivalent of this type of naked surveillance was when the Jews were stripped of their clothes under Nazi Germany (I know this sounds a bit over the top, but well it's not). The world needs to stop thinking that privacy is grant only to those who belong to certain nations.

[Edit: Thank you for the negative votes. The statements hold true despite your lack of respect for opinions.]