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Greenwald Criticizes Universities' Funding-Driven Collaboration With NSA
An anonymous reader writes Speaking at "Secrecy Week" at the University of Utah, one of the two journalists who helped disseminate Edward Snowden's revelations about the scope of National Security Agency surveillance has criticized universities which open up their campuses to government agencies in exchange for funding. Ex-Guardian journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, one of Snowden's first contacts after his flight from the NSA, commented: "Even if you think that you're the kind of person who does not have things to hide, just living in a world where you think you're being watched and recorded it changes your behavior from being a free individual. I would submit, and I don't think that it's in dispute, that we are far closer to the tyrannical model than we are the free model."
So...what you're saying is that university officials are giving the NSA my dick pics I sent over my campus email in exchange for funding?
No, government control doesn't necessarily mean a loss of privacy, which I think also helps explain why right-wingers aren't against it: It's a gross invasion of privacy (which at least neoconservatives don't care about, because they "have nothing to hide" and don't mind the government in their bedroom) but it's not any kind of government control structure (in itself).
Furthermore, the NSA roughly falls under the "defense" part of government which in the eyes of the right, gets every free pass in the book of free passes and cartes-blanche.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The government isn't simply "too big" or "too little", as if it's either one or the other. Some parts of the government have atrophied while others have expanded and become tumorous. Dealing with health care and commerce is usually a government's job anyway, unless you want to live in Somalia.
Think of it this way - conservatives are opposed to social change, liberals want social change.
Surveillence cements the status quo as embodied by laws so things like marijuana legalization which depend on people breaking the law to discover for themselves that the law is bogus are harder to accomplish. See also the way the FBI tried to blackmail MLK jr with their surveillence. Nobody ever gets blackmailed by the state for supporting the status quo.