Atlantic: The Problem With the ‘Privacy Moderates’

Atlantic: The Problem With the ‘Privacy Moderates’ / Their lukewarm defense of civil liberties is more bewildering than outright rejection by Conor Friedersdorf:

What if I told you that the surveillance state goes too far in secretly spying on innocent Americans — but that Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who exposed the scope of data collection, and Glenn Greenwald, the recipient of his leaks, shouldn’t be regarded as exalted heroes?

That sort of non sequitur isn’t my style. But if I wrote such a sentence in earnest, you’d know to identify me as a “privacy moderate.”

These are the Americans who acknowledge, as a consequence of recent revelations, that the national-security state ought to be subject to more oversight, debate, scrutiny, and restrictions, but can’t bring themselves to rhetorically ally themselves with the people championing those reforms. Instead, they contrive frames that enable them to criticize both the surveillance state and its antagonists, as if the excesses of both sides are commensurately important and worrisome. …