This is what intelligence policy oversight is designed to do: http://mattstoller.tumblr.com/post/74403978441/the-secret-government-problem-and-congressional
If you believe policy will stop this, you're a fool.
The US intelligence community oversight system has been comprehensively and robustly designed to prevent oversight from occurring.
They have a very careful playbook for dealing with exactly the problems they currently have, and are executing it well.
The Church Committee was an utter scam, and folks who waste their breath on policy would have us fall for this again.
USG (The United States Government) is an imperial structure by design; it can't be negotiated with. No democratic resolution is possible unless power shifts fundamentally
The only way to roll back USG (United States Government) surveillance - and by extension the surveillance of every other regime whether it pretends to democracy or not is via a comprehensive program of infrastructural reenginering that makes mass surveillance fundamentally impossible.
We must know that regardless of the assurances given the US intelligence comunity is an implacable active adversary to freedom of expression
I'm sure lots of folks in the IC (intelligence community) believe in freedom of expression & think they're helping. They've been misled by larger power structures.
Nothing I'm saying here is about them as individuals. While we may never be able to trust them, we will have to live with them.
While our direct response is infrastructural, the real change is cultural, and that's the one that will last.
We need a new story about our relationship with the technology of our lives & with the powers, capital, state, and other, that govern them.
We need new myths, new rituals, new scripts, a new understanding of our own history, new ways of living and social relations.
The infrastructural work will hopefully mostly be reinvention, but at times it will be a fight & victories there can be sometimes subverted.
When we win at a cultural level - and we must, for a dozen challenges, not just surveillance - subversion is much harder.
If your idea of building new myths involves private boats where the rich secede to build their new world apart, I hope you drown at sea.
Actively restructuring the world to insulate yourself from other's suffering/increasing your security at their expense is the def. (definition) of evil.
Any activity that attempts to prototype a liberatory way of life while engaging in such activity will fail utterly.
-- Eleanor Saitta, @dymaxion
26 January 2014