Portside

The government officials who, along with their courtiers in the press, castigate Snowden insist that congressional and judicial oversight, the right to privacy, the rule of law, freedom of the press and the right to express dissent remain inviolate. Yet the promise of that sentence in the Bill of Rights is pitted against the fact that every telephone call we make, every email or text we send or receive, every website we visit are tracked, recorded and stored.

During Black History Month, let’s not forget the speech-stifling history of US government spying that has targeted communities of color.

The Day We Fought Back: Hundreds of digital rights and privacy groups, thousands of individual Net users, in dozens of countries, have come together to protest surveillance by governments at home and abroad.

Reader Comments - Pete Seeger; Jews and Mayor de Blasio; Atlanta; NSA; Staples & Postal Jobs; Minimum Wage; Wars of Reconstruction; Brooklyn College CWE; Drugs and Philip Seymour Hoffman; Christie Scandal; Unions and Keystone Pipeline; Announcements - New Music Video-Close Guantanamo; Egyptian Revolution in Perspective -NYC-Feb 8; Fight Against VEOLIA Privatization -SF-Feb 8; Book Signing-William L. Patterson bio -LA-Feb 11; Labor - A Poor People's Movement -NYC-Feb 21

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. Not just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket, or the diplomatic costs, but the cost to our society. It breaks much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, our legal systems, our commercial systems, our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems, with loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty.

1. A civil liberties coalition calls for a day of protest against NSA abuses on Feb. 11. 2. Daniel Ellsberg debunks the "oath of secrecy" myth.