More significant, some Republicans didn't like Hayden's firm resistance to the privacy encroachments of the Patriot Act when she was head of the A.L.A. Her opposition to what she saw as potentially McCarthyite government intrusion into citizens' privacy earned her a Ms.
Facebook doesn't disclose the number of deactivated accounts, making it difficult to pin down exact numbers of users who have fled the social network; nevertheless, CNN has reported that bubbling disconnect with the site's gradual privacy encroachments has frothed over and driven some users to sign out of their accounts for good.
A commenter at ProPublica wrote, "People who are not sensitive about privacy encroachment are either strange egoists, pathological narcissists or poorly informed of the risks".
The president calls the vast eavesdropping apparatus "modest encroachments on privacy".
But he argued that "modest encroachments on privacy" were "worth us doing" to protect the country, and he said that Congress and the courts had authorized those programs.
He argued that "modest encroachments on privacy" — including keeping records of phone numbers called and the length of calls that can be used to track terrorists, though not listening in to calls — were "worth us doing" to protect the country.
Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration's claims that these "modest encroachments on privacy" were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to "meh".
And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content — that on, you know, net, it was worth us doing.
Other technologies, such as internet wiretapping and the ability to track the location of mobile phones, will arguably make much more substantial encroachments on privacy over the next few years.However, in the long term, biometrics, by their very nature, will compromise privacy in a deep and thorough fashion.
While President Obama has conveniently described the costs of what appears to be pervasive surveillance of Americans' telecommunications connections as "modest encroachments on privacy," what we are actually witnessing is a sea change in the kinds of things that the government can monitor in the lives of ordinary citizens.
But people may have better ideas and people may want to jigger slightly sort of the balance between the information that we can get versus the incremental encroachments on privacy that if haven't already taken place might take place in a future administration, or as technologies develop further.
