Why spy? That\u2019s the several-million pound question, in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Why would the US continue to wiretap its entire population, given that the only \u201cterrorism\u201d they caught with it was a single attempt to send a small amount of money to Al Shabab?
\nOne obvious answer is: because they can. Spying is cheap, and cheaper every day. Many people have compared NSA\/GCHQ mass spying to the surveillance programme of East Germany\u2019s notorious Stasi, but the differences between the NSA and the Stasi are more interesting than the similarities.
\nThe most important difference is size. The Stasi employed one snitch for every 50 or 60 people it watched. We can\u2019t be sure of the size of the entire Five Eyes global surveillance workforce, but there are only about 1.4 million Americans with Top Secret clearance, and many of them don\u2019t work at or for the NSA, which means that the number is smaller than that (the other Five Eyes states have much smaller workforces than the US). This million-ish person workforce keeps six or seven billion people under surveillance \u2013 a ratio approaching 1:10,000. What\u2019s more, the US has only (\u201conly\u201d!) quadrupled its surveillance budget since the end of the Cold War: tooling up to give the spies their toys wasn\u2019t all that expensive, compared to the number of lives that gear lets them pry into. (…)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let me use this as a notebook to make sure I have this article handy whenever I need reminding what’s going on. Technology should be used to create social mobility \u2013 not to spy on citizens NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance is more about disrupting political opposition than catching terrorists Cory Doctorow Tuesday 10 March […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-the-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sag.khm.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}