A take on the phone spy thing...

BILL MOYERS: We were warned. More than 60 years ago, George Orwell, in his novel 1984, described a society whose inhabitants were caught perpetually in the unblinking eye of Big Brother, an all-encompassing government gaze from which there was no escape.

Even earlier, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World invoked the vision of citizens bred for complacency, willing to be subjugated in exchange for the mindless pleasures of drug-induced, self-gratification. Just think, Orwell and Huxley wrote before Google, Facebook, Apple, Skype, Yahoo, and Microsoft; before smart phones, laptops, apps, and social media. And certainly before this age of modern global terror. Now we know our own government, through its National Security Agency, has been extensively engaged in the Internet surveillance of our emails and phone records, with the ability to single us out for scrutiny beyond what most of us could imagine. Big Government and Big Business have morphed into the Biggest Brother ever, not only watching and listening but also taking down names and numbers. Here’s Edward Snowden, the private contractor who worked for the NSA and leaked to the world what he learned on the job:

EDWARD SNOWDEN from The Guardian: Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the president if I had a personal e-mail.

 As of now, only Snowden fully understands his motives and the full extent of what he intends to reveal remains unknown. The White House insists snooping is a counter-weapon against terrorism, a necessary if unfortunate intrusion. General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, told Congress this week that the agency’s surveillance had helped prevent dozens of attacks. A large majority of the public agrees that the spying is necessary, but others see it as an unprecedented infringement on our civil liberties, a massive threat to a free society.

Whatever your take on the recent revelations about government spying on our phone calls and Internet activity, there’s no denying that Big Brother is bigger and less brotherly than we thought. What’s the resulting cost to our privacy — and more so, our democracy?

“Snowden describes agents having the authority to pick and choose who they’re going to be following on the basis of their hunch about what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. This is the worst of both worlds. We have a technology now that gives them access to everything, but a culture if again it’s true that encourages them to be as wide ranging as they can,”

 “The question is — are there protections or controls or counter technologies to make sure that when the government gets access to this information they can’t misuse it in all the ways that, you know, anybody who remembers Nixon believes and fears governments might use?”

Few are as knowledgeable about the impact of the Internet on our public and private lives as Lawrence Lessig, who argues that government needs to protect American rights with the same determination and technological sophistication it uses to invade our privacy and root out terrorists.

“If we don’t have technical measures in place to protect against misuse, this is just a trove of potential misuse…We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. And the government should be implementing technologies to protect our liberties,” Lessig says. “Because if they don’t, we don’t figure out how to build that protection into the technology, it won’t be there.”

“We should recognize in a world of terrorism the government’s going to be out there trying to protect us. But let’s make sure that they’re using tools or technology that also protects the privacy side of what they should be protecting.”

A former conservative who’s now a liberal, Lessig also knows that the caustic impact of money is another weapon capable of mortally wounding democracy. His recent book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It, decries a pervasive “dependence corruption” in our government and politics that should sound a desperate alarm for both the Left and the Right. Here, Lessig outlines a radical approach to the problem that uses big money itself to reform big money-powered corruption.