From L. Clark
The backlash over monitoring of online data by security services in the US and UK is highlighted in your editorial (15 June, p 5) and also in Hal Hodson’s article on how to avoid governments snooping on you (p 21).
But governments cannot provide security without surveillance. If voters are happy with being significantly less secure but having more privacy, then fine. However, I suggest this would change after a couple of terrorist incidents.
This is not to advocate that there should be no safeguards, or that police-state surveillance should be the norm. The problem is that the politicisation of the leak that revealed such surveillance has caused many people to lose all perspective.
It is clear that the US National Security Agency is run by ageing hippies. One only has to read the “Split the difference” box in Hodson’s story and recall the album cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and the code name Project Prism instantly springs to mind.
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Craigie, Western Australia
Houston, Texas, US
