"Snowden has proven, as no one in my era has better proved, that exposure of the Bad Guys in government has no negative effect on them."

What Has Edward Snowden Accomplished?
Economic Policy Journal

Long term EPJ readers will recall that right from the start I had mixed feeling about the Edward Snowden leaks. On June 16, 2013 in a post titled, Why I Am Not Impressed with the Edward Snowden NSA Leaks, So Far, I wrote:

Are we being set up for a more open aggressive tracking by the government? I have no reason to question the sincerity of Glenn Greenwald and his desire to break open the secretive tracking of Americans by the United States government. However, I am very suspicious of the manner in which MSM jumped on the story and pushed it so hard.[...]Anyone paying close attention to the news would have suspected, a long time ago, that something like this type of spying and data collection was going on. Indeed, I regularly commented on such here at EPJ, most recently on May 4, in a post titled, Are All Telephone Calls in the US Recorded by the Government?[...]

I don't think there is enough information to make a call on this from the outside, at this time. That said, I am not impressed with the Snowden leaks to date. He has only leaked information that a closer follower of government snooping would have already known about or suspected..

I went on to say:

[I]t appears we have something of a limited hangout here by USG. The purpose is unkown, though I suspect what may be going on is that the USG may be wanting to use in court cases some of the data they are collecting. BUT in order to do this, they have to acknowledge they have the data in the first place, which may be what the leak to Greenwald is all about (and the leaks to WaPo about USG tracking internet data).

Now Gary North recaps what has occurred since the leaks first became public:

I appreciate what Snowden did. His decision to leak the stolen documents has done the conservative movement an enormous favor. It has blown to smithereens the greatest single myth of conservatism: “If the American people knew about this, there would be an uprising.” No, there wouldn’t.

Here is a variation: “If the voters knew what is being done to them by the Conspiracy, they would throw out the conspirators at the next election.” No, they wouldn’t...

Snowden has proven, as no one in my era has better proved, that exposure of the Bad Guys in government has no negative effect on them.

If exposure does come, and the public does nothing to thwart the hidden Bad Guys, then the Bad Guys no longer have to worry about further exposure. It will be old news. At this point, they can do even more to secure their position of power. The pressure blows over. There may be a time of bad publicity, but this does not change anything fundamental....

The NSA is more powerful than ever. From now on, any further exposure is old news. No harm, no foul....

Has the spying center in Utah been shut down? No. It is going to come online as promised. It has all kinds of snafus associated with it, as any government bureaucracy does. But Congress has in no way reined it in. The public has not demanded that Congress rein it in.

Is there any indication of a mass political movement inside either of the two political parties to bring the NSA under control, let alone abolish it? No. The public doesn’t care one way or the other. All the public needs to know is that the NSA is stopping terrorism, and the rest of it is irrelevant. The public says A-OK. No problem.

Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/