We are headed in the opposite direction because that's not a solution, that's sticking your head in the sand.

Supporting whistleblowers is not sticking your head in the sand.

The PRISM program & Palantir's products do not give YOU any transparency into anything.

I was referring more to the "stop funding concentrated surveillance programs" part. Just because your own government isn't spying on you doesn't mean you are not being spied on. It just means you have deluded yourself into believing you have privacy. Far better, in my opinion, to accept that privacy is no longer possible in the 21st century so that we can start figuring out how to live without it.

Who in this thread is arguing for PRISM? Certainly that's not what Dr. Lessig is asking for either.

What Lessig is asking for (see his 1999 book "Code", and his plug of Palantir) is for software that can cross correlate data from multiple sources to identify leaks of information for the purpose of copyright protection. He (and others) believe that the right software can provide privacy while "securely" storing vast amounts of data, through "immutable audit logs". The problem is, he's wrong, and this isn't technically possible.

The kind of technical naiveté that believes that surveillance software can be secure and auditable, is what is allowing the NSA PRISM software to develop, and concentrating too much data. When you hear Obama claim that PRISM is transparent, he's referring indirectly to flawed technical arguments.

So no, of course Lessig won't argue for PRISM. But he is arguing for measures that PRISM probably already has, measures that cannot be sufficient.

I haven't read the book itself, but it's obvious that 'immutable audit logs' don't prevent privacy violations. They would simply make these privacy violations detectable. Enforcement of privacy violations would still be up to the rest of the oversight structure (whether that's institutional, external audits, journalism, special interest groups, or a combination thereof).

And either way, technical measures that would be insufficient for PRISM may very well be sufficient for most of the rest of what government does.

As a final note I think that sometimes we tech types get way too wrapped around preventing outcomes which are already so implausible as to be merely theoretical, and use that to oppose measures which, while imperfect, would still be useful if applied. It's "The Perfect is the enemy of the good" that we see in software project management, applied to the government at large.