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It’s time to ponder a troubling possibility: What should we do if the Islamic State wins? By “wins,” I don’t mean it spreads like wildfire throughout the Muslim world, eventually establishing a caliphate from Baghdad to Rabat and beyond. That’s what its leaders say they are going to do, but revolutionary ambitions are not reality and that possibility is particularly far-fetched. Rather, an Islamic State victory would mean that the group retained power in the areas it now controls and successfully defied outside efforts to “degrade and destroy” it. So the question is: What do we do if the Islamic State becomes a real state and demonstrates real staying power? That possibility is looking more likely these days, given Baghdad’s inability to mount a successful counteroffensive. If MIT’s Barry Posen is correct (and he usually is), the Iraqi Army no longer exists as a meaningful fighting force. Not only does this reveal the bankruptcy of the U.S. effort to train Iraqi forces (and the collective failure of all the commanders who led this effort and kept offering upbeat assessments of progress), but it also means that only a large-scale foreign intervention is likely to roll back and ultimately eliminate the Islamic State. This will not happen unless a coalition of Arab states agrees to commit thousands of their own troops to the battle, because the United States will not and should not do the fighting for states whose stake in the outcome exceeds its own.

Don’t get me wrong — I’d be as pleased as anyone if the Islamic State were decisively defeated and its violent message utterly discredited. But one needs to plan not just for what one would like to see happen, but also for the very real possibility that we can’t actually achieve what we want — or at least not at a cost that we consider acceptable. So what do we do if the Islamic State succeeds in holding on to its territory and becoming a real state? Posen says that the United States (as well as others) should deal with the Islamic State the same way it has dealt with other revolutionary state-building movements: with a policy of containment. I agree.

Jeremy Corbyn delivered his uncompromising stance on Western warmongering from the back of a London taxi last week. As the cab raced through the streets of the capital, the new Labour leader revealed his vision for an ethical foreign policy in his 17-minute interview with Middle East Eye.

Asked how he would deal with ISIS, the anti-war campaigner was uncompromising. “ISIS (a.k.a. ISIL & Daesh, edt.) didn’t come from nowhere, they’ve got a lot of money that’s come from somewhere. They have a huge supply of arms that have come from somewhere and they are, not in total but in part, a creation of western interventions in the region,” he said. According to Corbyn, he would deal with the terror group by economically isolating its members. He says he would attempt to unite other groups in the region and stressed the importance of supporting autonomy for Kurdish groups. On the rise of ISIS, he pointed to the vast amount of arms that Britain sells, particularly to Saudi Arabia, declaring they must have ended up somewhere and are now being used. Corbyn was vehemently opposed to the 2013 Parliamentary vote on military intervention in Syria and remains adamant that bombing the country now would create more mayhem. He told Middle East Eye it would be very unclear who the alliances would be with.

On the region in general, he referred to Israel and Palestine as a massive issue. Unlike his British counterparts, he expressed grave concern at the illegal Israeli settlements, military occupation of the West Bank, and lack of reconstruction in Gaza. Praising the recent agreement with Iran, he said he wished it had included the issue of human rights,

Just days after expressing outrage over reports of widespread surveillance of foreign leaders by the National Security Agency, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) pushed through the Senate Intelligence Committee on an 11-4 vote a bill that enshrines the bulk collection of Americans' phone call records into law, and expands the agency's authority to track foreign nationals who enter the United States. The bill, passed on Thursday, is meant to respond to the revelations of leaker Edward Snowden. But critics immediately charged that it does little more than offer a fig leaf for the NSA's controversial surveillance operations.

In his statement, Udall disagreed. "The NSA's ongoing, invasive surveillance of Americans' private information does not respect our constitutional values and needs fundamental reform -- not incidental changes," Udall said. "Unfortunately, the bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee does not go far enough to address the NSA's overreaching domestic surveillance programs." Udall is a co-sponsor of a bill introduced earlier this week by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that would end the NSA's bulk collection of phone call records. The passage of Feinstein's bill sets up a confrontation with Leahy's Judiciary Committee over what version of NSA reform Congress will produce. "The Feinstein bill is terrible and would make things worse. I think the Leahy-Sensenbrenner bill begins to address some of the problems" with the NSA, said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Neither bill, Granick said, addresses the NSA's infiltration of Yahoo and Google data centers worldwide, which could provide the agency a pathway to collecting Americans' communications.

French spies secretly organized and funded the Libyan rebels who defeated Moammar Gadhafi, according to confidential emails to Hillary Clinton that were made public on June 22.

“In return for their assistance,” the memo states, “the DGSE officers indicated that they expected the new government of Libya to favor French firms and national interests, particularly regarding the oil industry in Libya.” The email goes on to state that Jalil and Younis “accepted this offer” and “have maintained contact with the DGSE officers in Cairo.” The memo is titled, “How the French created the National Libyan Council, ou l’argent parle.” Another memo dated May 5 asserts that individuals close to the council stated “in strictest confidence” that as early as mid-April 2011 French humanitarian flights also included “executives from the French company TOTAL, the large construction from VINCI and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company N.V. (EADS).” Subsequent flights have allegedly carried representatives “from the conglomerate THALYS and other large French firms, all with close ties to [Sarkozy].” “After meeting with the [council] these French business executives leave discreetly by road, via Tobruk to Egypt,” the memo states. “These convoys are organized and protected by para-military officers [from the DGSE].” The memo adds that Levy himself came up with the idea and obtained the council’s signature on an agreement to give French firms “favorable consideration” in business matters. He is said to have used “his status as a journalist to provide cover for his activities.”

The memos from Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal contradict the popular French narrative about its intervention in Libya, raising fresh questions about a war that toppled a dictator but left chaos and radicalism in his stead. They were allegedly written by retired CIA operative Tyler Drumheller and released by a special congressional panel investigating the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. The oft-repeated media tale in France holds that then-President Nicolas Sarkozy was outraged by Gadhafi’s crackdown on protesters in February 2011 but had no clear idea who to support. Enter a swash-buckling “intellectual,” Bernard-Henri Levy, who met with Transitional National Council leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil on March 4, immediately called Sarkozy, and had the French president invite Jalil to the Elysee Palace — and recognize the council as the country’s official government by March 10. The emails to Clinton tell a distinctly less heroic story. According to one entry from March 22, 2011, “officers” with the General Directorate for External Security — the French intelligence service — “began a series of secret meetings” with Jalil and Gen. Abdul Fatah Younis in Benghazi in late February and gave them “money and guidance” to set up the council, whose formation was announced Feb. 27. The officers, “speaking under orders from [Sarkozy] promised that as soon as the [council] was organized France would recognize [it] as the new government of Libya.”

BAGHDAD (AP) — U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria have likely killed at least 459 civilians over the past year, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday. The report by Airwars, a project aimed at tracking the international airstrikes targeting the extremists, said it believed 57 specific strikes killed civilians and caused 48 suspected "friendly fire" deaths. It said the strikes have killed more than 15,000 Islamic State militants. While Airwars noted the difficulty of verifying information in territory held by the IS group, which has kidnapped and killed journalists and activists, other groups have reported similar casualties from the U.S.-led airstrikes. "Almost all claims of noncombatant deaths from alleged coalition strikes emerge within 24 hours — with graphic images of reported victims often widely disseminated," the report said. "In this context, the present coalition policy of downplaying or denying all claims of noncombatant fatalities makes little sense, and risks handing (the) Islamic State (group) and other forces a powerful propaganda tool."

The U.S. has only acknowledged killing two civilians in its strikes: two children who were likely slain during an American airstrike targeting al-Qaida-linked militants in Syria last year. That same strike also wounded two adults, according to an investigation released in May by the U.S. military. That strike is the subject of one of at least four ongoing U.S. military investigations into allegations of civilian casualties resulting from the airstrikes. Another probe into an airstrike in Syria and two investigations into airstrikes in Iraq are still pending. U.S. Army Col. Wayne Marotto, a spokesman for the coalition, did not address the report directly, but said "there is no other military in the world that works as hard as we do to be precise." "When an allegation of civilian casualties caused by Coalition forces is determined to be credible, we investigate it fully and strive to learn from it so as to avoid recurrence," he said in a statement emailed to the Associated Press.

Airwars said it identified the 57 strikes through reporting from "two or more generally credible sources, often with biographical, photographic or video evidence." The incidents also corresponded to confirmed coalition strikes conducted in the area at that time, it said. The group is staffed by journalists and describes itself as a "collaborative, not-for-profit transparency project." It does not offer policy prescriptions.

Hillary Clinton is in the same game as the Republicans: She is trying to raise money from Jewish hawks. Here is excellent reporting from Politico‘s Kenneth P. Vogel and Tarini Parti: “Hillary Clinton signals to Jewish donors: I’ll be better for Israel.” The piece is frank about where money comes from for a race that could cost over $2 billion, pro-Israel Jews. The [Iran] negotiations are of intense interest for some Jewish donors whose political giving is animated by their support for Israel. They’re being counted on by Clinton’s allies to donate huge sums for a campaign and a pair of supportive super PACs that, taken together, are expected to raise $2 billion or more.

Last summer, Clinton distanced herself from Obama in her book, saying that she only came out against settlements because she was Obama’s “designated yeller” as Secretary of State; and now she distances herself in raising money. Hillary Clinton is privately signaling to wealthy Jewish donors that — no matter the result of the Iranian nuclear negotiations — she will be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama. The piece suggests that Clinton is waffling on Iran to raise money from a handful of megadonors: But, even as donors increasingly push Clinton on the subject in private, they have emerged with sometimes widely varying interpretations about whether she would support a prospective deal, according to interviews with more than 10 influential donors and fundraising operatives… [One donor tells Politico that] Jewish donors who oppose a deal and favor military intervention in Iran “are going to put her in a box.”

Clinton’s allies are carefully monitoring the sensitivities of a handful of hawkish Democratic mega-donors for signs that the Iran talks may be influencing their willingness to write million-dollar super PAC checks. Chief among that group is billionaire Hollywood entrepreneur Haim Saban, who sources say has spoken multiple times with Clinton and her top aides about the deal. And as she did in her book, Clinton brags on her relationship with Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the rightwing leader of a government with fascistic strains in it.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton bought into the neocon/liberal-hawk agenda which spread the chaos of Iraq across Libya, Syria and now into Europe. How Clinton approached those challenges suggests that she would head down the same “regime change” path as President, Rick Sterling explains.

By Rick SterlingKey leaders from around the world are present at the United Nations this week to discuss critical issues; one of the most pressing is Syria. How did we get to this point with half the Syrian population (almost 12 million) displaced and under-populated but huge areas of Syria now controlled by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), Al Qaeda (Nusra) and other fanatical fundamentalist groups?Hillary Clinton’s 2014 book Hard Choices reveals important information about the first years of the Syrian conflict and how we got where we are today. Clinton’s account conveys the perception, priorities and bias at the top level of the Obama administration. The book describes policy differences within the administration and the common assumptions and goals which have led to the current disastrous situation.

Offering a first glimpse of the secret 12-nation “trade” deal in its final form—and fodder for its growing ranks of opponents—WikiLeaks on Friday published the final negotiated text for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s Intellectual Property Rights chapter, confirming that the pro-corporate pact would harm freedom of expression by bolstering monopolies while and injure public health by blocking patient access to lifesaving medicines. The document is dated October 5, the same day it was announced in Atlanta, Georgia that the member states to the treaty had reached an accord after more than five years of negotiations. Aside from the WikiLeaks publication, the vast majority of the mammoth deal’s contents are still being withheld from the public—which a WikiLeaks press statement suggests is a strategic move by world leaders to forestall public criticism until after the Canadian election on October 19. Initial analyses suggest that many of the chapter’s more troubling provisions, such as broader patent and data protections that pharmaceutical companies use to delay generic competition, have stayed in place since draft versions were leaked in 2014 and 2015. Moreover, it codifies a crackdown on freedom of speech with rules allowing widespread internet censorship.

A White House official said Tuesday that Venezuela was not a threat to the national security of the United States, backing off language in an executive order that had inflamed relations with the South American nation and drawn criticism from other countries in the region.The comments came as President Obama prepared to leave for a trip to the Caribbean and Latin America that will include a meeting of heads of state from the hemisphere.“The United States does not believe that Venezuela poses some threat to our national security,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, during a telephone call with reporters to discuss the president’s trip.

He was referring to an executive order signed by Mr. Obama last month that called for economic sanctions against seven Venezuelan officials who the United States said were involved in human rights abuses or violations of due process. Continue reading the main story Related in Opinion Editorial: A Failing Relationship With Venezuela MARCH 12, 2015 The executive order said that Venezuela was a threat to national security and that it constituted a national emergency for the United States.

The language escalated tensions between the two countries and provoked an angry response from President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Even Venezuelan opposition leaders said it was excessive and had inadvertently played to Mr. Maduro’s political benefit.American officials had previously sought to play down the language in the order, saying that the administration was required by law to make the security threat designation to carry out the sanctions.But Mr. Rhodes went further on Tuesday, explicitly stating that Venezuela did not pose a threat, adding that the language was “completely pro forma.”“We, frankly, just have a framework for how we formalize these executive orders,” he said.

(Reuters) - Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday demanded that all sanctions on Iran be lifted at the same time as any final agreement with world powers on curbing Tehran's nuclear program is concluded. Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's most powerful figure and who has the last say on all state matters, was making his first comments on the interim deal reached between Iran and the powers last week in the Swiss city of Lausanne.He repeated his faith in President Hassan Rouhani's negotiating team. But in remarks apparently meant to keep hardline loyalists on side, he warned about the "devilish" intentions of the United States."I neither support nor oppose the deal. Everything is in the details, it may be that the deceptive other side wants to restrict us in the details," Khamenei said in a speech broadcast live on state television.His stand on the lifting of sanctions matched earlier comments by Rouhani, who said Iran would only sign a final nuclear accord if all measures imposed over its disputed atomic work are lifted on the same day.

These include nuclear-related United Nations resolutions as well as U.S. and EU nuclear-related economic sanctions."All sanctions should be removed when the deal is signed. If the sanctions removal depends on other processes, then why did we start the negotiations?" Khamenei said.However, the United States said on Monday sanctions would have to be phased out gradually under the comprehensive nuclear pact. France also said on Tuesday that many differences, including on sanctions, needed to be overcome if a final agreement was to be reached.

A senior U.S. diplomat was in Venezuela on Wednesday for talks with President Nicolas Maduro ahead of a regional summit in which tensions between Caracas and Washington threatened to overshadow a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations. News of the visit by State Department counselor Thomas Shannon came after Maduro announced promotions for two of the seven officials the United States sanctioned in March for alleged human rights violations and corruption. Caracas responded at the time by ordering most U.S. diplomats posted in the Venezuela capital to leave. Shannon flew to Venezuela on Tuesday after its leaders invited the Obama administration to send a senior official to Caracas in advance of the three-day Summit of the Americas, which begins Friday in Panama.

Shannon was expected to meet with Venezuela’s opposition coalition Thursday. There was no immediate word on the content of the talks. Maduro made his announcement about the promotions of two officials on Tuesday evening. One of the promoted officials is Katherine Harrington, who will oversee criminal investigations. As a prosecutor, she has charged several opposition members with attempting to overthrow the government. The other is Manuel Perez Urdaneta, who will oversee citizen safety. He was previously national police director. Maduro has called the sanctions an act of war and hails as national heroes those who have had their U.S. assets frozen and visas revoked.

Also on Wednesday, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff spoke to Maduro and Vice President Joe Biden on the phone Tuesday, according to a statement released by her administration. She found that Maduro is willing to smooth relations with the U.S., and offered her help in fostering dialogue, according to the statement.

Russia and Venezuela have objected to a draft United Nations resolution that would ban arms shipments to leaders of Yemen’s Houthi Shiite rebels and the country’s former president and his son to try to halt their military campaign against supporters of the embattled president. U.N. diplomats said Russia wants the Security Council resolution to include an arms embargo on all parties in the Yemen conflict — not just the Houthis and their supporters. It also wants the resolution to authorize “humanitarian pauses” in airstrikes by a Saudi-led military coalition supporting the president, which Moscow called for on Saturday, they said. The diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because negotiations have been private, said talks between key parties were continuing to try to reach agreement on the draft resolution, sponsored by Jordan.

The depth of the sectarian war unleashed in Yemen shows itself in almost every Gulf Arab official statement and in the official press. The Saudis take it as read that Iranian forces are actually present in Yemen to assist the Shia Houthis. There are Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon with the Houthis. Iran is itself behind the Houthi uprising. One Kuwaiti journalist calls the Houthi rebels “rats”. As usual in Arab wars, real evidence has gone out of the window.

At a Syrian refugee conference in Kuwait this week, the Saudis were lauded for their generosity in pledging $60m for homeless and destitute Syrians out of a total of $3.8bn of promised aid world wide. No-one was ungenerous enough to mention that the Saudis bought $67bn worth of weapons from the US in 2011-12.

With that kind of money you might be able to buy up most of the protagonists in the Syrian war and get them to agree on a ceasefire. But this is the figure that makes sense of the Yemen war.That, and the fact that Pakistan is part of this extraordinary coalition. Pakistan is a nuclear power – “Saudi Arabia’s nuclear bomb outside Saudi Arabia”, as one conference delegate bleakly put it in Kuwait.There are 8,000 Pakistani troops based in the Saudi kingdom. And Pakistan is one of the most corrupt and unstable nations in South-west Asia. Bringing Pakistan – widely believed to have shipped second-hand weapons to anti-government rebels in Syria via Saudi Arabia – into the Yemen conflict is not adding oil to the fire. It’s adding fire to the oil.Iran has maintained a diplomatic silence. When Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal accused Iran of supporting the destabilisation of Yemen, the Iranian deputy foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned that the Saudi attack was a “strategic mistake”, a comparatively mild reaction.

The president said in August that Mr. Snowden should come home to face those charges in court and suggested that if Mr. Snowden had wanted to avoid criminal charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses, acting, in other words, as a whistle-blower. “If the concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.” In fact, that executive order did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important, Mr. Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The N.S.A. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.

Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.” It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.

Is this why the President feels he cannot fire his clumsily devious Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had to apologize to Congress for giving “clearly erroneous” testimony in March? Is this why he allows National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and counterparts in the FBI to continue to mislead the American people, even though the intermittent snow showers from Snowden show our senior national security officials to have lied — and to have been out of control? This may be small solace to President Obama, but there is no sign that the NSA documents that Snowden’s has released include the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report on CIA torture. Rather, that report, at least, seems sure to be under Obama’s and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein’s tight control.

But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. He fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion, and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was very obviously mutual.

Britain has offered Nato an armoured battle group including up to 25 tanks to join exercises in Poland as a show of force against Vladimir Putin. The deployment would see as many as 1,000 British soldiers join Nato forces for war games across the border from Ukraine later this year. The offer was disclosed as David Cameron prepares to meet the Russian president on Thursday and wrangling over the Ukraine crisis seems certain to dominate world leaders’ visits to the D-Day anniversary events.

The diplomatic storm over Ukraine continued as Barack Obama condemned Moscow’s “dark tactics”, while Mr Putin hit back against American aggression. Mr Obama said Nato’s eastern members including Poland would “never stand alone," as he addressed crowds in Warsaw.

As the Syrian conflict enters its fourth year, one thing is clear: The U.S.-backed rebels are losing the war. Assad's army, once dismissed as inadequately equipped, ill-prepared for guerrilla fighting and of suspect loyalty, is chalking up victory after victory. Unlikely as it once seemed — and as unpalatable as it may be to U.S. policymakers and their allies — Assad could well end up the sole Middle East leader to remain in power after coming under threat from the so-called Arab Spring revolts. Assad has survived in large part because of disarray in the rebel ranks, including the rise of Islamist militants hostile to Syria's tradition of tolerant Islam; a steady flow of military and financial aid from Moscow and Tehran; and a revived Syrian military bolstered by local militiamen and Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon. The latter have proved a major asset, routing rebels close to the porous Lebanese border and providing a disciplined, well-trained force to take pressure off the overstretched military. Assad has also benefited from a sense of war-weariness that has prompted many insurgents to lay down their arms and civilians to turn against the struggle. Barring an unexpected development, such as Assad's death or direct foreign intervention, it's hard to fathom how the opposition can turn things around.

What is more troubling is the greater geopolitical agenda driving both of these seemingly “internal” conflicts – and that they both lead back to a single source beyond China’s borders. With the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) now implicated in receiving, training, and employing terrorists from China’s Xinjiang province, and considering the fact that ISIS is the result of an intentional, engineered proxy war the US and its allies are waging in the Middle East, along with the fact that the unrest in Hong Kong is also traced back to Washington and London, presents a narrative of an ongoing confrontation between East and West being fought on the battlefield of fourth generation warfare.

If one was asked to name a global-spanning military and intelligence operation opposed to Syria, Iran, Russia, and China, they might say the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Government – and they would be right. But they could also easily answer by saying the “Islamic State” or ISIS/ISIL as it is also known. This is especially true after revelations surfaced that US-backed Uyghur separatists in China’s western-most province of Xinjiang have joined ISIS for training with intentions of leading an armed rebellion against Beijing upon their return. Reuters in their article, “China militants getting IS ‘training’,” would claim: Chinese militants from the western region of Xinjiang have fled from the country to get “terrorist training” from Islamic State group fighters for attacks at home, state media reported on Monday. The report was the first time state-run media had linked militants from Xinjiang, home to ethnic minority Uighur Muslims, to militants of the Islamic State group of radical Sunni Muslims.

However, it isn’t just China’s government that claims militants in Xinjiang seek to carve out an independent state in western China – the militants themselves have stated as much, and the United States government fully backs their agenda to do so. Indeed, first and foremost in backing the Xinjiang Uyghur separatists is the United States through the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). For China, the Western region referred to as “Xinjiang/East Turkistan” has its own webpage on NED’s site covering the various fronts funded by the US which include:

What does it look like when a society loses its sense of privacy? <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" title=""><img style="border:none;" src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" alt="" /></a></div>In the almost 18 months since the Snowden files first received coverage, writers and critics have had to guess at the answer. Does a certain trend, consumer complaint, or popular product epitomize some larger shift? Is trust in tech companies eroding—or is a subset just especially vocal about it? Polling would make those answers clear, but polling so far has been… confused. A new study, conducted by the Pew Internet Project last January and released last week, helps make the average American’s view of his or her privacy a little clearer. And their confidence in their own privacy is ... low. The study's findings—and the statistics it reports—stagger. Vast majorities of Americans are uncomfortable with how the government uses their data, how private companies use and distribute their data, and what the government does to regulate those companies. No summary can equal a recounting of the findings. Americans are displeased with government surveillance en masse:   

A new study finds that a vast majority of Americans trust neither the government nor tech companies with their personal data.

What does it look like when a society loses its sense of privacy? <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" title=""><img style="border:none;" src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" alt="" /></a></div>In the almost 18 months since the Snowden files first received coverage, writers and critics have had to guess at the answer. Does a certain trend, consumer complaint, or popular product epitomize some larger shift? Is trust in tech companies eroding—or is a subset just especially vocal about it? Polling would make those answers clear, but polling so far has been… confused. A new study, conducted by the Pew Internet Project last January and released last week, helps make the average American’s view of his or her privacy a little clearer. And their confidence in their own privacy is ... low. The study's findings—and the statistics it reports—stagger. Vast majorities of Americans are uncomfortable with how the government uses their data, how private companies use and distribute their data, and what the government does to regulate those companies. No summary can equal a recounting of the findings. Americans are displeased with government surveillance en masse: