In the department of who cares what I think but I'm going to tell you anyway, here's my take on the squabble so far.
Glenn Greenwald is a an asshole. I don't trust him as a journalist. But the actions of British police in subjecting his partner to nine hours of interrogation at the London airport that was a transfer point was sheer thuggery, and exactly what people are justifiably afraid of when "security" gets too much power.
That the Brits overstepped their bounds is also the opinion of the U.S. White House and in fact of the Brit who helped write the terrorism law they supposedly were employing: Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the former Labour lord chancellor who was involved in introducing the anti-terror legislation used to detain Miranda, said the police had no right to detain him under the Terrorism Act 2000... Falconer, who helped introduce the act in the Lords before he became lord chancellor in 2003, told the Guardian: "I am very clear that this does not apply, either on its terms or in its spirit, to Mr Miranda." (Yeah, ironic for USers that the guy's name is Miranda and his rights were violated.)
As for the NSA etc. there's been more heat than light. The heat ranges from the media simply suggesting untoward intrusions to the rhetoric of Greenwald and Snowden likening it to Nazi atrocities. While even President Obama acknowledges that Snowden's revelations got America to pay attention to the problems of ensuring privacy at the same time as the law and the country apparently wants every possible effort to track and stop terrorists, there's so far only fragmented and inconclusive information about what's really going on.
While some folks like Andrew Sullivan and John Cassidy at the New Yorker are alarmed, Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker is less concerned about the revelations than what the costs of Snowden's security breach are and will be. Only on the basis of the arguments each has made so far, I'm more persuaded by Toobin.
It goes without saying that thuggery and similar excesses are always a danger with any kind of police, and the more power and secrecy they have, the more potential for big bad abuses. But we're not so far talking about anything being done with any information gathered, or for that matter, any information other than the fact of someone calling someone, which like it or not (as Toobin notes) is not protected by law. Maybe it should be but it ain't. Also, it could be that the only people in America who are surprised by this are those who haven't seen a cop show in the past five years.
We're also not talking about censorship, about tracking what people take out from the library, or about torture, or sending people to secret prisons never to be heard from again--we're not even talking about the abuse of that stupid concoction called the no-fly list. All of which the American public was apparently willing to allow by reelecting President Bush in 2004, who instituted them all.
And again I'll only mention that the most active intrusions and use of collected information that I know of are by corporations for their own profit and that of their clients. Beyond that, I'd like to see more light on the subject and less self-serving heat. Yeah, idealist.
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