Just a quick comment on "Nothing new here imho." One of Martin Luther King's friends and supporters, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, said the following:

"I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I’m not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society."

I think this perspective is what drove Heschel to "pray with his legs" as he put it. I appreciate this perspective of spirituality, and thought it might be insightful.

At least the decades-long civil rights campaigns that MLK Jr., X and others were part of led to actual demonstrations, wide-scale public unrest and finally, major legislative changes.

Compared to that, the Wikileaks, Snowden leaks and Panama Papers revelations have resulted in tumbleweeds.

As it turns out, fleeing the country and hiding in your nations nominal rival is no way to start a grassroots campaign to thwart civil injustice.

Snark aside, King wanted to lead a movement and take all the associated risks with it. In the end, history showed us that he would become a martyr before seeing his goals met.

I can’t fault Snowden, for wanting only to blow the whistle then immediately seek personal safety.

Apples to oranges.

King was fighting against non technical, publicly understood, explicit interpretations of laws carried out by local/state police.

Snowden was/is fighting against secret interpretations of laws dealing with highly technical subject matter carried out by secret police seeking national security on a global scale.

Moreover, remember that as soon as King spoke out against the national security state in his Beyond Vietnam speech, a great many of his supporters abandoned him and the secret police drastically ramped up their campaign to neutralize him; he was assassinated exactly 1 year later.

So?

I mean you are right, but you are right in a very odd way. Imagine this headline:

Local boy gets beat to death.

Then some random guy comes to comment: "Well that happens all the time, it's not news."

I mean sure, it's true, but it's callous, it's minimizing and trivializing what happened, it's acting like it's always inevitable and it's not bringing anything new to the table. It's not just helping, it's actually detracting from any meaningful conversation. In short, I get the feeling that such responses come from smug people who aren't very kind. Not saying you are, just saying how you come off to me.

I am not sure what you were responding to, but my "Nothing new here" comment was directly referring to the OP's statement that read:

>Nice, I see we're entering the new era of us surveillance.

(Emphasis mine)

So I just said it's not new.

That's all.

I apologize profusely for coming off as smugly unkind!

> Nothing new here imho.

True statement. However - the laws are mostly officially predicated on this not being true. They're predicated on people whose stuff gets subpoened and end up under surveillance actually having more of a hint of guilt, rather than mere association. There's a mismatch between laws and a legal system that surveil and subpoena and investigate based on some kind of evidence, and putting someone into that system based on mere association.