Washington And The World Why the Surveillance State Lives On The Snowden revelations have fizzled politically, and reform isn’t coming any time soon.

Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

Once upon a time, Glenn Greenwald was a lonely voice in the blogging wilderness, and Edward Snowden was an isolated functionary at the heart of the American national-security state. Then everything seemed to change at once. Snowden, who was desperate to tell his fellow Americans of the evils of NSA surveillance, revealed his secrets to Greenwald, Congress erupted, the entire world got angry, and Greenwald won a Pulitzer and a fat media contract from a billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar while Snowden became the most famous exile in the world.

Now it looks very much like Greenwald is becoming a voice in the blogging wilderness again, and Snowden is watching from Moscow, once again isolated, as his explosive revelations fizzle out politically. On Tuesday, led by Republicans voting en masse, the U.S. Senate defeated a motion to vote on the USA Freedom Act, which would have curbed the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records. The new, harder-line Republican Congress coming in January doesn’t seem likely to pass the bill either, to the point where Greenwald lamented in blog post Wednesday that it was “self-evidently moronic” to rely on the U.S. government to fix the U.S. government. “Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires,” he wrote. “The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance.”


Nor does Greenwald think that the courts, especially the Supreme Court, will do the trick, despite a Dec. 2013 district court ruling against the NSA’s phone-data collection program: “When it comes to placing real limits on the NSA, I place almost as little faith in the judiciary as I do in the Congress and executive branch.” As for the noble libertarian entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, they’re also dealing falsely with us, Greenwald said. The big internet companies deliberately supported a watered-down bill “to point to something called ‘reform’ so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest,” he wrote.

Of course, by “the entire system in DC” and America’s entire private sector Greenwald is suggesting that pretty much everybody—the whole republic—is failing him and isn’t going to deliver the changes he believes are necessary. That’s a bit of an odd conclusion, considering that Snowden and Greenwald were, not long ago, waxing triumphant about the way their revelations were changing the conversation. Their fundamental premise: If only people could be awakened to the horrific extent of the national-security state, they could be depended upon to act on their own. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” Snowden told Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of last year. “As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. … All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed.”

But “society” doesn’t appear now to be pushing much for change, and the “public” seems to have spoken on Nov. 4, the first time the nation had gone to the federal ballot box since the Snowden revelations broke. One of the less-noted messages out of the midterm election was that virtually every NSA supporter was re-elected handily, and some of the most vociferous proponents of tighter restrictions on surveillance, like Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), lost in surprising upsets. Even more to the point, an issue that only a year ago had Congress in an uproar—with members getting earfuls about NSA intrusions at constituent town meetings—was almost a complete no-show issue in the election, the first to be held since the Snowden revelations. Very few candidates brought the NSA up.

A few things, of course, have changed in the year or so since the Snowden revelations startled Washington and set the legislation in motion. For one thing, the NSA has begun internal reform under the direction of the White House, although Obama left to Congress such critical issues as how the NSA should collect telephone metadata. Meanwhile the rise of new violent Islamist groups like ISIS, with their seemingly regularly scheduled beheadings of hostages, has given NSA hawks new ammunition. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday, former NSA director Michael Hayden and attorney general Michael Mukasey called the USA Freedom Act “NSA reform that only ISIS could love.”

But perhaps the more profound trend is that Americans just don’t seem to care as much as we once thought a year ago—an outcome that Snowden himself feared, once talking of “NSA fatigue.” With the most sensational revelations past us, the lingering concern over NSA surveillance has become diluted by a general sense of resignation over the loss of privacy. This is not much of a surprise, frankly. We already live in an EZ-Pass world, one in which we are willing to let the government keep a record of everywhere we drive in exchange for the mere convenience of getting through the toll booth more quickly. We shop online despite knowing that the commercial world will track our buying preferences. We share our personal reflections and habits not only with Facebook and Google but also (often unknowingly) with thousands of online marketers who want our information. “One thing I find amusing is the absolute terror of Big Brother, when we’ve all already gone and said, ‘Cuff me,’ to Little Brother,” John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., told me in 2013 shortly after the Snowden story came out.

A remarkable study published earlier this month by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, which conducts independent research on privacy and data collection, found that in the year and a half since the Snowden revelations only a relatively small number of Americans, about 14 percent, care enough about their privacy on a consistent basis to change their behavior so as to preserve it. That number is unchanged from a Poneman study done in 2012, before the Snowden revelations. These motivated few are the people who will not buy a book on Amazon because they would have to surrender information about themselves, or who don’t go to certain websites if they fear they’re going to be behaviorally profiled, or won’t contribute to political campaigns for the same reason. By contrast, a substantial majority of Americans, about 63 percent, say they care about their privacy, but “there’s no evidence to suggest they’re going to do anything different to preserve it,” says Larry Ponemon, who runs the institute. “It’s very troubling to me, to be honest. People talk a good game. They tell us they are really concerned about what the NSA is doing, but in the end they don’t really care enough to take a stand.”

The Pew Research Center has also just published a study, “Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era,” which concludes that even though “across the board, there is a universal lack of confidence among adults in the security of everyday communications channels,” people don’t really have a strong sense of how to act to change that. According to the Pew survey, 61 percent of adults say they would like to do more to protect do more to protect their privacy “but they feel overwhelmed, and they don’t know where to begin,” says Mary Madden, the principle author of the Pew survey.

On top of that, the anti-NSA activists have failed to keep the momentum going by coming up with actual instances of state abuse of surveillance (although Greenwald told me in an interview over the summer that five Muslim-Americans monitored by the NSA were “harassed by the government in different ways”). Even the American Civil Liberties Union, which once called NSA surveillance “a stone’s throw away from an Orwellian state,” admits it knows of no cases where anything even remotely Orwellian has happened.

As for Greenwald, he’s putting most of his faith in one striking datum, the increase in the use of encryption by Internet users, which he says “is reflective of a much broader change from the Snowden reporting, perhaps the most important one: a significantly increased awareness of the need for encryption and its usage around the world.”

But that’s not going to restrain the NSA. On the contrary, it’s far more likely to force the agency to be more intrusive. One should have a little perspective on how the NSA came to be the data-gobbling monster it is today: After the Cold War it was said to be falling behind; it was going “deaf,” and encryption along with the sheer volume of Internet and cell phone traffic was the reason. On December 20, 2002, a Senate Intelligence Committee (one that included Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today one of the most vociferous NSA critics) came to the following conclusion in its official report on the mistakes that led to 9/11: The National Security Agency had harmed U.S. counterterrorism efforts that might have prevented that terrible day because of the agency's "failure to address modern communications technology aggressively."

The report, a joint effort of the Senate committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, blamed "NSA's cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States, and insufficient collaboration between NSA and the FBI regarding the potential for terrorist attacks within the United States."

All it will take is one ISIS attack against a U.S. target—or perhaps some more beheadings—for the public to decide it’s worth it yet again to surrender privacy for safety.

The anti-NSA movement is hardly over. Among those who voted against the Senate bill on Tuesday, for example, was presidential hopeful Rand Paul, formerly a leading voice against the NSA. But Paul said he came out against the bill only because he said that he believed the legislation, which would have ended the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata and created a special advocate position to argue against the government in the FISA courts, wasn’t strong enough because it would renew portions of the Patriot Act for another two years, including the controversial Section 215 that authorizes the mass collection of telephony metadata. Some anti-NSA legislators say they might simply wait for the expiration of Section 215 next June and fight its re-authorization.

But for now, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden have become lonely voices once again. Even at his new company, First Look Media, Greenwald is looking lonelier, with the departure of his editor-in-chief, John Cook, and Matt Taibbi, who had been drafted to start up a companion site to Greenwald’s “The Intercept.”

And come the 114 th Congress in January, they’re likely to be even more isolated. Perhaps the surest sign that the domestic reaction and outrage from Snowden has flagged—and is about to hit a wall in the new Senate—can be found in the likely incoming head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, North Carolina’s Richard Burr. His legislative ACLU score on civil liberties is zero, and the zealously pro-CIA-and-NSA Burr once famously declared: “If I had my way, with the exception of nominees, there would never be a public intelligence hearing."