Society can't be blasé about extensive government spying

Whatever else is said about Edward Snowden, he has achieved his objectives. Pre-Snowden, most people knew little about the shadowy US government arm that journalist David Rohde, in a recent article in The Atlantic magazine, calls the "security-industrial complex".

All they knew was that it may have protected the US against attacks like those that happened on September 11, 2001. But they couldn't know for sure because the complex operates under a cloak of secrecy.

In an interview, Snowden stated his main goal: "The public needs to decide whether these policies are right or wrong." Since he leaked classified documents, the public has learned much more about the security-industrial complex.

Rohde described how, while "the American public is not allowed to know the rules and results of US counterterrorism policies … a sprawling secrecy industrial complex does".

"More than 4.9 million Americans now have government security clearances. Another 1.4 million have 'top secret' clearance," he wrote.

This is a security-industrial complex that would make George Orwell's Big Brother proud. And it is operated in the name of what Orwell hinted, in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, was the force that keeps a nation's population under control: the "outside threat".

Snowden's father, Lon, put his finger on the problem. He likened the government's collection of personal data and e-mails to the government coming around every day to each family's mailbox, opening the mail and recording it, cataloguing and storing the information permanently, then resealing the mail and replacing it in the mailbox. In another age, such an act would have been an outrage. Now it seems simply routine.