After 2 days of careful study of the speech of the US President, Barack Obama, regarding the planned reforms, we have not found any reforms yet. What we found are assurances that they are not tracking those who do not threaten them, again without defining what constitutes a threat to the US. Even for her monitoring heads of allied states there is an asterisk in Obama's speech.
We could only characterize the US president's speech as "appeasing" and not of substance. Both for internal and for external consumption. Justify the unjustifiable. His talk revolved around the artificial dilemma, security or protection of the private life. Pretext for unprecedented mass surveillance by the US intelligence community. Mass surveillance without specific justification (indications of violation of laws), without targeted and justified discrimination among the people being monitored, is nothing more than "Big Brother"-style preventive state policing.
Privacy is first and foremost, freedom and democracy right the citizens. Everything else comes after.
Security against terrorism should not remove the very freedom it is supposed to protect. To protect freedom and democracy, you are building protection systems and not mass monitoring and preventive policing systems. The reason is simple, applying preventive security will eventually end up having security, but you will not have democracy and freedom because you simply will not have private life. You will end up with a society of fearful citizens, who will even fear their shadow, do not even break a law and be accountable for everything they do, even for whatever they say.
Ultimately, it seems that the terrorist hit on the twin towers did much more than the designers and performers were planning. They managed to scare the citizens and lead them to tolerate security by losing their freedom or a large part of it. The US from a superpower and democratic republic was transformed into a "terrified state" (with or without quotation marks).
Let us hope that President Obama's promises to control the secret services and continue the open dialogue will not be kept in the mood.
"Whoever freely collects, comprehends well"
Rigas Velestinlis
