Nice.
I recommend Snowden’s book, Permanent Record, as well as his recent interviews on TV but the book is best. Like Maddow’s recent book, Blowout, Snowden provides a solid, and I know to be true, context for understanding US data government data collection. In my book “How to get your privacy back” (now that you have lost it all), I argue that we can get it back if we make the effort to understand how technology, law, and social contracts can be used to our advantage. It turns out the technique is to demand true open, moderated (civil), dialogue. What you have described would provide a very nice case in the Internet Court of Lies.
The one criticism I would have of this article, which I hope is constructive, is that what the government has done is only a small fraction of the same problem with others. Just taking the USA, and recognizing that countries like China are worse, single companies, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon, Palantir, etc. and the list goes on, collect much more data, and more invasive data, and analyse it much more deeply than what Snowden did and observed being done by the US government.
Indeed, you might ask what the government did with the data it collects? It is comparably innocuous. And what is the comparison about what could be done with it? Again, comparably innocuous (as demonstrated, for example, by what Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and Trump and his minions did, and does).
Indeed, in having lived in a number of these worlds for years, I actually trust our government, because of the oversight they do have on them, more than I trust some of these companies because of the oversight they do not have.
There are solutions to fix this, but the science says that only through enforced, moderated, absolutely public dialogue about disinformation can the light be held brightly enough to control the use of data. This is what my proposal for an Internet Court of Lies, putting lies, not people, in jail is required. Here is a friends link for distribution on my summary of my lies book:
Such civil informed public dialogue is also the position of George Washington in his farewell address, summarized here in his own exact words with another free friends link.
