[Really excellent article, and important. -egg]

I am mystified by the “privacy moderate” who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.

What I sense, but cannot prove, is the privacy moderate’s desperation to avoid facing the full extent of the establishment’s extreme behavior. Americans once condemned such excesses. The Obama Administration is nowhere near as morally odious as, e.g., the bygone East German state. But Americans didn’t just criticize its surveillance apparatus, the Stasi, because the East German regime used it for evil. Quite apart from the character of the regime and its secret police, Americans found the very notion of secret, pervasive spying on innocent citizens repugnant. We found the notion of vast files kept on private citizens creepy, because that isn’t the role the state ought to play in a free society. Today, the American state is engaged in intentionally spying on tens of millions of innocent citizens. It did its utmost to hide the truth about that spying.

Civil libertarians are objecting as if this is a historic scandal of the utmost importance — and it is exactly that. Privacy moderates are obsessed with policing the objections for hyperbole. They can tell their grandkids, “When I found out America was secretly spying on tens of millions of innocents, I focused on criticizing the people who overreacted rhetorically.” It’s like the blogs that spent the run-up to the Iraq War obsessing about scattered Bush-Hitler signs at anti-war protest rallies, as if, absent push-back, the nation was ready to side with the sign-makers; or like a doctor who worries more about cosmetic scars than cratering white blood-cell counts.

via The Problem With the ‘Privacy Moderates’ – Atlantic Mobile.