This month’s Cato Unbound features Glenn Greenwald on “The Digital Surveillance State.” He makes the case that it’s too big, too invasive, and too unwieldy to deliver on its promise of security. Rather than finding the needle, we’ve only made the haystack bigger. Commenting through this week and next will be a panel of noted experts in the field, including John C. Eastman, Julian Sanchez, and Paul Rosenzweig.
Cato Unbound brings together people of many different viewpoints to disagree civilly and constructively, on issues that are interesting to libertarians. That’s the goal. We don’t pick people to write based on sharing a common viewpoint. That would be boring, and no one would read it.
With that said, Glenn Greenwald has already written for Cato, to great acclaim. He is a prominent civil libertarian who has done excellent work on privacy, detainee treatment, habeas corpus, and free expression. Why wouldn’t we want him to write for us? I’d say he is a lot closer to Cato ideologically than you suspect.
More reading here:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-309.html
Money quote from the Cato story: “We’ve gotten so used to the ‘privacy/security tradeoff’ that it’s worth reminding ourselves, every now and again, that surrendering privacy does not automatically make us more secure — that systems of surveillance can themselves be a major source of insecurity.”
Put all that stuff in a bucket, and people will start looking for the bucket.
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