My Tuesdee article begins like so:
The most popular article on The Atlantic yesterday was a sloppy-wet rant about how the National Security Agency (NSA) has “commandeered” the internet. Yes, commandeered it. The author of the post, Bruce Schneier, wrote that the government’s “surveillance apparatus” has taken over “vast swaths” of the internet just as the military commandeers ships and factories during wartime. But since we’re not at war (we’re not?) and this is peacetime (it is?), this commandeering is unacceptable.
There’s an important point to be made here about how we as Americans regard both corporations and the government, but first things first. This article is absurd.
Schneier literally begged internet tech companies to shield him from the big bad government by refusing NSA’s requests to attain user data as part of the agency’s effort to monitor overseas communications. Yes, this is where we’ve arrived: Team Greenwald is pleading with for-profit corporations to protect them from the government. On the surface, it appears to be another significant lurch in the direction of Ron Paul’s huffy-puffy whimsical jalopy brand of fantastical anti-government libertarianism. More on this presently.
The unspoken reality is that the government invented the internet when it established ARPANET, under the Defense Department agency now known as DARPA (home of the creepy robots). The government also regulates the internet. Government R&D funding helped to create Mosaic, the first web browser. The government will spend $1.4 billion on web infrastructure and content next year (not enough, in my opinion). The United States ranks ninth in internet speed and this pathetic ranking won’t be solved by tech companies alone. The government is the only thing that stands between net neutrality and corporate-tiered bandwidth. The reality is that in terms of “commandeering” the internet, the government was here before you were.
And, yes, the government also collects relatively minor bits of your internet data (with multi-layered oversight, warrants, anonymization, minimization and deletion) in its efforts to track down enemies.
Liberals ought to be far more suspicious of for-profit corporations handling our private data than the government’s handling of considerably less of it. But that doesn’t appear to be the case, and this is where everything gets wacky… [CONTINUE READING]