sar nsa have on them. is there a j. edgar hooverish going on? the other thing you think about, look, you may be comfortable with the nsa surveilling america under a president you like, but are you going to be comfortable with it under a president or politician that you don t like? what about when your mayor gets access to this or your police department gets access to this? these are the kinds of questions that are legitimate. james, i think we re going to see that. we see that in different jurisdictions where people have very different relationships necessarily to who the executive is. do you think we ll see a change if and when president obama were to leave office? we might, but i think at the core here is that there s no data that suggests that stop and frisk reduces crime. there s other things, community policing, different demographic patterns or different things that factor into that. that s the same thing about the nsa and war on terror. if we want to prosecute the war on ter
nsa is a white person issue and stop and frisk is a black person issue. i see this all the time in the way people respond to the stories. david, i m interested in how you responded to james piece. look, i share the concern of somebody who s written a lot about and talked a lot about on radio here in colorado, a lot about police brutality and the disproportionate use of police power against people of color. i think i have a similar concern. my concern is more with, although not exculusively with, but more with the media. you look at people, let s say people breaking these stories about nsa and edward snowden. glenn greenwald. this is somebody writing about stop and frisk. wrote a whole book in part about stop and frisk and racial profiling. what i m concerned about is people who are concerned about both sets of issues, what we see in the national media is only the nsa and privacy and digital surveillance issues tend to get
the kinds of headlines that s interesting. that stop and frisk and physical surveillance get. and i think that s a problem and i think, perhaps, the calculation there among the national media is because the nsa surveillance affects everybody and because stop and frisk only affects, or is disproportionately targeted at color exactly. that the national media should only cover nsa story and not stop and frisk. chris, listen please. i want to be honest here, also. i feel like if we work together, we can get more accomplished. so if we can find a space or an issue where we can cut across some of these racial lines and class lines and understand the ways in which oppression in this case, surveillance, whether physical or digital, works together, and we have to actually work together against the state, against the government, to make them honest and make sure we sort of resolve some of these issues. generally speaking, chris, i m much more interested in working togethe
these days. i agree. so here s my question for you. because i also feel that one of the differences between these two issues is that what i was saying before, these issues get coated racially. i see a lot of people respond to me when i cover the nsa, concern about the nsa and whatever it is doing is an outgrowth of fr privilege, yourself. if you re trying to make sure your 16-year-old son isn t jacked up by cops every day, you re not that worried about whatever screen of data that is happening in some remote there s something to that, but then at the same time it also feels like this is a way of marginalizing a story about what the government can do that really is connected in a very direct way to what the government s doing up and down from the federal down to the local level. sure. i m trying to push back against that marginalization. go ahead, james. trying to push back against that marginalization. it s difficult to do that because what you re saying is the real it s th
i think when you talk about the surveillance state, we ve got to connect the dots here. i felt very, ver strongly we needed another voice to sort of try to do some of those things. i m not a legal expert and not an expert on surveillance studies, but i do a little bit of news and news media. what i was finding we weren t connecting those dots and felt there s an important conversation to have in a holistic way in the ways in which physical surveillance has been around for quite some time and i think the digital surveillance we re thinking about now is an outgrowth of that. the physical surveillance to me seems to be more or less invisible in terms of the public media and national scene when we talk about some of these issues. i thought it was a great piece for this reason. i thought you got at the heart of what shows up in my social media feed any time we talk about particularly the nsa issues, but either of the issues which is a bifurcated word. in the worst way, i want to be carefu