President Obama speaking in San Jose, California, on the NSA phone records program Evan Vucci/AP
The Government Needs to Stop Overreacting to NSA Leaks
The more serious threat of NSA surveillance comes from the the collective insanity or the simple loss of perspective, that an attack evokes. By James Fallows
This column over the weekend, by the British academic John Naughton in the Guardian , takes us one more step in assessing the damage to American interests in the broadest sense-- commercial, strategic, ideological – from the panopticon approach to "security" brought to us by NSA-style monitoring programs.
Naughton's essay doesn't technically tell us anything new. For instance, see earlier reports like this , this , and this . But it does sharpen the focus in a useful way. Whoever wrote the headline and especially the subhead did a great job of capturing the gist:
In short: because of what the U.S. government assumed it could do with information it had the technological ability to intercept, American companies and American interests are sure to suffer in their efforts to shape and benefit from the Internet's continued growth.
Read more at The Atlantic .