Snowden revelations won't change scale of US spying
Martin Murphy says the Snowden revelations will change neither the extent of American surveillance, nor the broad acceptance even among democracies of the need for espionage
After all the breathless commentary about the Edward Snowden cyberspying case is said and done, and the hero-villain rides off into the sunset, critics of America will be left with an unsettling reality. Little will have changed in what many now see as a massive surveillance state in the US.
Like the military-industrial complex before it, the US surveillance and intelligence community is now a multibillion-dollar industry with deeply entrenched interests, a robust government-business-private contractor revolving door, and a general acceptance by most Americans that certain activities are needed to protect the country.
The scale of the industry may astonish some, but the information has been in the public domain for some time. In just one example, a two-year Washington Post investigative report in 2010 revealed that some 1,271 government organisations and 1,931 private companies were working on programmes related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence across the US, employing millions of Americans.
More recent public information has highlighted the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency, given that both are now in the same business of looking for ways to collect, analyse and exploit large pools of data.
With such resources invested, reforming current practice is certain to be an uphill battle. President Barack Obama has promised new checks and more transparency on US domestic surveillance and a national debate on the issue. But it will take a seismic shift in public and congressional attitudes to fundamentally alter America's foreign surveillance programmes. And opinion polls in the US say that such a shift may be a long time coming.
A recent Pew Research Centre/ USA Today poll showed that 54 per cent of Americans supported a criminal case against Snowden. When asked about the US government's collection of phone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, 48 per cent approved, compared with 47 per cent who disapproved. Such deep splits in public opinion often lead to inertia and support of the status quo.
And the more the US government comes across as being transparent, with open hearings and briefings about its surveillance programmes, the more the average American might feel less squeamish about personal data collection. For example, many Americans, after hearing that 50 terrorist plots were stymied, may conclude that collecting metadata is an acceptable price to pay, as most already feel the programmes have helped prevent terrorist attacks.