Recent history showed us true nature of crowds, or to put it differently, of us. Single person had the guts to expose actions of one of the world powers, making himself a possible victim of the wrath of that same titan. I am sure that Mr. Snowdon was hoping for a different reaction of all the public – or if not different, then maybe a lot stronger. But we, crowds, have pretty much ignored him and as a consequence, we have ignored – or accepted – what is being done to us.
Why is so? Why don’t we care anymore about our rights (especially right to privacy) and freedoms? Why, through silence, we allow others to read our mail, follow our steps through the World Wide Web, peek at our shopping lists, save all we do? All this in the name of fight with terrorists… imaginary and real.
The USA played it very right, ignoring and downplaying the whole issue. But we, people, have helped them with this. First of all, as single people, we cannot prove – or find out – in what way we were followed or spied upon. Secondly, we possibly anyway expected that this is happening and therefore accepted the confirmation as old news. Thirdly, we maybe don’t care, as we are busy fighting crisis…
European politicians have reacted with political correctness and managed not to say anything of any real value, which could not be later withdrawn or interpreted in different way (the only black spot in all this is a story of Bolivian president airplane…). I think that they are much more personally annoyed (as they are the ones who definitely were spied upon) and wonder what dark secrets Obama now has managed to gather about them. On one side then they need to be careful with what they say (an Edgar Hoover effect), on the other too much money is at stake to do anything worthwhile about the fact.
So where are we, so-called average citizens? We have sold ourselves cheap. We have also taught all governments a valuable lesson – we are stupid and malleable. If issue is not sensational, if it is smartly downplayed, it will disappear. Same thing happened to organized thievery of saving accounts on Cyprus. Through our lack of resistance we only confirmed that anything can be done to us. That is the real outcome of this history.
And Mr. Snowden? I, for one, am thankful to him and I am amazed at his courage. But he will disappear in on pages of history, just as he will disappear one of these days from the cover pages of the magazines. Note that the stories written about him have an aura of sensational escape, barely touching the real issue behind it… Poor Edward. He acted out of his personal anger, miscalculating ignorance and indifference of crowds. We sold him too.
Mr. Rommie Blog 