Some stories have legs: They just keep coming; they don't fade away.
Perhaps the ultimate story with legs this year, in The Times and elsewhere, has been about government surveillance. And that's just one tiny reason Edward J. Snowden would make an unfathomably better choice for Time magazine's Person of the Year than Miley Cyrus. (The finalists were announced Monday; we'll see how Mr. Snowden, the former government contractor, and Ms. Cyrus, the twerking twentysomething, fare against Pope Francis, among others, on Wednesday morning.)
Occasionally on this blog, I've rounded up some of the current surveillance-related coverage. And here I am doing it again. To wit:
1. Five Nobel laureates and hundreds of other prominent writers protested surveillance practices and their chilling effect on free expression and creativity, and called for an international digital bill of rights. Jeanette Winterson, the British author, was quoted in The Guardian:
Our mobile phones have become tracking devices. Social networking is data profiling. We can't shop, spend, browse, email, without being monitored. We might as well be tagged prisoners. Privacy is an illusion. Do you mind about that? I do.
2. In The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza's sweeping, scary and depressing piece about President Obama and why he doesn't rein in what so many see as surveillance abuses. He writes:
In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.'s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records†provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information.
3. In Esquire, Tom Junod's interview with the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken many of the Snowden-sourced surveillance articles. A highlight:
The promise of the Internet has always been that it was gonna be this unprecedentedly potent instrument of liberation and democratization. That it would empower people to band together to work against oppression. That it would let you explore things and meet people who you wouldn't otherwise get to know in completely free and unconstrained ways. And what has happened instead is that we face the threat that it's the exact opposite - that instead the Internet could become the most potent and odious tool of human control and oppression in human history.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 10, 2013
An earlier version of this blog post referred incorrectly to Miley Cyrus's age. She is 21; she is no longer a teenager.Â
