| Teesus | Date: Sunday, 2013/08/11, 2:51 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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In a bit of fortuitous timing, this week we had asked former deputy chief of staff for Ron Wyden, Jennifer Hoelzer, to do our weekly
"Techdirt Favorites of the Week" post, in which we have someone from the
wider Techdirt community tell us what their favorite posts on the site
were. As you'll see below, Hoelzer has a unique and important
perspective on this whole debate concerning NSA surveillance, and given
the stories that came out late Friday, she chose to ditch her original
post on favorites and rewrite the whole thing from scratch last night
(and into this morning). Given that, it's much, much more than a
typical "favorites of the week" post, and thus we've adjusted the title
appropriately. I hope you'll read through this in its entirety for a
perspective on what's happening that not many have.
Tim Cushing made one of my favorite points of the week in his Tuesday post "Former NSA Boss Calls Snowden's Supporters Internet Shut-ins; Equates Transparency Activists With Al-Qaeda," when he explained that "some of the most ardent defenders of our nation's surveillance programs" -- much like proponents of overreaching cyber-legislation, like SOPA -- have a habit of "belittling" their opponents as a loose confederation of basement-dwelling loners." I think it's worth pointing out that General Hayden's actual rhetoric
is even more inflammatory than Cushing's. Not only did the former NSA
director call us "nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in
five or six years," he equates transparency groups like the ACLU with al Qaeda.
I appreciated this post for two reasons:
First of all, it does a great job of illustrating a point that I've long
made when asked for advice on communicating tech issues, which is that
the online community is as diverse and varied as the larger world we
live in. Of course, we are more likely to come across the marginal
opinions of twenty-somethings with social anxiety online because, unlike
the larger world, the Internet gives those twenty-somethings just as
much of an opportunity to be heard as a Harvard scholar, a dissident
protesting for democracy or General Hayden himself.
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