Greenwald: NSA is 'increasingly close to fulfilling' the 'total elimination of privacy'

Source: The Stranger

Journalist Glenn Greenwald will appear tonight (Tuesday) at a sold out event at Town Hall (in Seattle) to discuss his book, "No Place to Hide," which expands on his series of reports on the NSA's massive Internet spying programs. Last week Greenwald spoke to me from Rio de Janeiro, where he lives.

... Q: What's the scariest thing you've learned since meeting Edward Snowden? Is it something in the revelations that have come out so far, or is it something that you haven't yet published?

A: The scariest thing is the over-arching one, that the goal of the NSA really is captured by their "Collect it all" motto. That they're not interested in targeting specific people's communications for storage and analysis, they literally want to convert the Internet into (unintelligible, blame the NSA) where they collect and store all communication events by and between all human beings on the planet. Essentially, the total elimination of privacy in the digital age. Which is not hyperbole. It's just a literal description of their institutional goal as they conceive of it. And it's not just a theoretical goal. They're increasingly close to fulfilling that. And, you know, every other specific revelation has to be understood through that prism.

... Q: You mentioned the tech companies. I've read about their attempts to push back. Do you feel like they've done enough to secure their systems against what the NSA and other agencies are wanting to do?

Well, I think it's important to begin with the premise that the tech companies don't care at all about their users' privacy. And they proved that by very eagerly cooperating with the NSA, far beyond what the law required, when they thought they could do it without anybody knowing about it. So, they have nothing but contempt and indifference toward the privacy of their users. And that includes, I would say, first and foremost, Microsoft. Although Facebook and Google are scarcely better. So, the situation that changed now is not because they've suddenly discovered a concern for privacy but because, as I said earlier, they're petrified that German, Brazilian, and Korean competitors are going to be able to convince ten-year-olds and twelve-year-olds to not use American tech companies on the grounds that they'll just give their data to the NSA... So, now these (American) companies are engaged in what seems to be a serious effort to prove to people that they are safeguarding their customers' privacy. They're putting up walls between their own data and what the NSA can get, they're revisiting the kind of cooperation that they were doing previously that they're not obligated under the law to do, so I think that it has changed the relationship between tech companies and the NSA in the direction of privacy protections. But only out of their self-interest, not because they have any belief in the value of protecting peoples' privacy.

Read more: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/06/17/the-stranger-asks-glenn-greenwald-about-microsoft-snowden-and-what-to-fear-now