I really wish I could sign the White House petition to pardon Snowden, but I don't want to get my name on the no-fly list or any other such secret lists of "terrorists".
I wonder how many Americans are afraid to speak out for the same reason. I guarantee every one of those 110,000 people who signed that petition are now being closely watched.
I guess I'm living my life in the government bubble.
If you're censoring your feelings out of concern for the security apparatus, you are really missing the point. This is not Mao's hundred flowers campaign, and it is your job as a citizen to make sure it never gets there.
The only way to stop this leviathan is to change minds. If you thought SOPA was a dark day for the internet, surely this sucking up of network metadata and content data strikes at the heart of end to end communication.
I wonder if we need to start over on the privacy-protected internet, just to make sure this can never happen again.
> I wonder how many Americans are afraid to speak out for the same reason. I guarantee every one of those 110,000 people who signed that petition are now being closely watched.
My inclination is that this is mostly a paranoid fantasy on your part, rather than anything resembling reality.
>I really wish I could sign the White House petition to pardon Snowden, but I don't want to get my name on the no-fly list or any other such secret lists of "terrorists".
Really? You believe that signing a petition could get your name onto a 'no-fly list or any other such secret lists of "terrorists".' and you haven't fled the country? Isn't that outrageous?
>I guarantee every one of those 110,000 people who signed that petition are now being closely watched.
This is nuts. If there is such a list, I'd be ashamed to be left out.
If the list is based solely on petition signing, it would probably be titled "Mostly Harmless Complainers"
I'm proud to have signed the petition and I'll tell anyone who asks. The government depends on cowardice to get away with what they've done so far. The least a citizen can do is to sign a few petitions and contact your representatives to tell them what you think about this.
I'm sure I'm already on the NSA's Christmas list for donating to WikiLeaks. However, I haven't signed the petition to pardon Snowden because, although I'm basically sympathetic to his actions as they've been reported, I don't know enough about exactly what he did, what he's doing now, and what he might do in the future to lobby for a "pardon." It is becoming increasingly clear that his actions were not as well thought out as people have been assuming they were.
What would help at this point is for additional conscientious government employees and contractors to follow Snowden's example. ("If you see something, say something.") It would be easier for me to get behind a mass resistance movement than a single guy who, frankly, has said and done some things that don't suggest a high degree of mental stability.
They don't need analysts to watch them. They just need to add their contact information to their 'watch more closely' list, and then run that through their data mining software. There's more than enough processing power to add a few hundred thousand more people to their 'intense scrutiny' list.
Not that I expect that it's actually going to happen, but it's not beyond the realm of their capability.
I wonder how many Americans are afraid to speak out for the same reason. I guarantee every one of those 110,000 people who signed that petition are now being closely watched.