O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

sexta-feira, 7 de junho de 2013

Governo Obama invade a privacidade dos cidadaos - Foreign Policy, New York Times

Uma tendência preocupante, e potencialmente mais ofensiva do que as patifarias do Nixon e as arbitrariedades do Bush W.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


The PRISM through which the WH views privacy; An award for Mabus; An “out member” gets a second star; Five vet charities termed “the worst”; Sonenshine on public diplomacy; and a bit more.
By Gordon Lubold
Foreign Policy, June 7, 2013

After the Verizon story yesterday, new revelations about the Obama administration's tapping of Internet records. The WaPo obtained a top-secret document that shows that the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the servers of nine American Internet companies, "extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets," according to the paper this morning. "The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley."

And: "Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: 'Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.' PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush's secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority."

The war ain't over.  Despite Obama's declaring that "all wars must end" in a recent speech at National Defense University, the revelations of Internet tapping and phone records show that at least behind that shadowy world, the administration is still very much on a war footing. The NYT's Peter Baker: "Whatever his ambivalence about what President George W. Bush called a global war, Mr. Obama has used some of the same aggressive powers in the name of guarding national security even, in the view of critics, at the expense of civil liberties. Rather than dismantling Mr. Bush's approach to national security, Mr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing."

Strange bed fellows: Baker notes how Dems like Al Gore and Tea Partiers like Rand Paul see the privacy issue in much the same way. "'Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?' former Vice President Al Gore, the former Democratic presidential nominee, wrote in a Twitter message. On his own Twitter account, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a possible Republican presidential candidate, condemned the surveillance as 'an astounding assault on the Constitution.'

WaPo published slides that describe the PRISM program, here.

Why you shouldn't be hyped about some of this. Writing on FP, Stewart Baker: "Does this mean the end of privacy, law, and the Constitution? Nope. There are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that these "scandals" signal a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties. Despite this apparent breadth, and even if we assume that the leaked FISA order is genuine, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that it signals a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties."
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EDITORIAL

President Obama’s Dragnet



Um comentário:

Eduardo R., Rio disse...

-- O homem é um santo --
por João Pereira Coutinho, doutor em Ciência Política.
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/joaopereiracoutinho/2013/05/1281443-o-homem-e-um-santo.shtml