The recent revelations about NSA data collection activities has brought the issues of surveillance by the US government to center stage in the public attention. One of them is the responsibility of government officials from the president on down to act within the limits of the law and the constitution. There are good historical reasons to take that concern seriously. The most famous and flagrant of them is the long term illegal clandestine activities of the FBI under it director for life J. Edgar Hoover. He blackmailed enough politicians that they lived in mortal fear of him. He was not a single anomaly. There is documentation of evidence of presidents who used illegal means of collecting information for various purposes. Hoover was only too happy to place himself at their disposal. There was a political climate that made such activities acceptable if they were kept within limits. Nixon was the president who took it to such extremes that the political establishment was forced to institute some reforms which were conducted under the Church committee during the 1970s.
We do have documented evidence that the Bush administration was engaging in data collection activities beyond the limits of the existing law following 9/11 and continued to do so for years. In 2008 Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act which supposedly legalized those activities. Senator Obama voted against that legislation. The Obama administration is presently claiming that everything that is going on now is legal under the provisions of that law. That is one issue of debate which will require the disclosure of more information if it is going to be resolved.
However, another issue that is much more complex is the nature of the technology and its ever expanding reach and capabilities. If J. Edgar is looking on from the beyond, he is surely green with envy over the tools available to his successors. He needed a vast army of FBI agents to go out and find people to identify for surveillance based on their activities. Then the business of putting wire taps on mechanical phone switches, interviewing neighbors and fellow employees was all very labor intensive and limited in scope. There were more than a few instances of completely innocent people being caught up in his dragnet, but the vast majority of Americans did not have a high risk of falling into it. The activities were illegal and unconstitutional but there were limits on them just from practical constraints.
In the 21st C those practical constraints are on the verge of entirely vanishing. It is not an exaggeration to talk about a computer/telecommunication revolution. In the past 30 years most aspects of public and personal life in the industrial world have been impacted and transformed. Those that haven't been are likely to be in the near future. One of the things that makes this technology different is the exponential rate at which its power increases. At the same time the cost of the storage capacity and the processing power steadily declines.
Before the NSA became the hot button issue, there was already concern over the growing reach of internet based multi-national companies like Google and Facebook that collect and store information about billions of people and what they do with that information. We now know that one of the things they do is share some of it with the government on demand. A key issue in the design of personal communication and social media applications is to give users a sense of privacy and control. That sense is often more of an illusion than a reality. This story from yesterday is just one of many that recur over and over.
Facebook Bug Exposed Email Addresses, Phone Numbers Of 6 Million Users
While I am sure that there are people who wouldn't agree, it is possible to live without Facebook. Personally, I've come to the conclusion that it's pretty boring. However, my email is mostly with Google and my phone is a smartphone connected to AT&T and Google. I really could not get along without those. I am retired with a pretty simple life. My concerns about privacy are not what they would have been when I still had a business and professional reputation to maintain. My focus is on protecting my accounts from the sort of people who want to steal financial data like credit card and bank account numbers and malicious software and viruses. Having worked in the tech industry I am likely more scrupulous about security than many people. I do a weekly full backup and rotate passwords. When I saw people concerned about this stuff I was inclined to tell myself that it wasn't something that was really going to effect me. Well, I am now calling myself up short on that.
The reality is that computers and the internet have already invaded most people's lives to the point that doing without them becomes a serious disruption. There really isn't any way to turn back the clock on this. Developments that are actively underway right now are going to make us more and more wired. Utility companies are installing smart networks that we will have to be connected to in order to get electricity, gas and water. The next generation of home appliances will be internet enabled. All that promises ways to help us become a greener society and reduce the carbon footprint along with such conveniences as programming your dinner from your smart phone. However, the downside is that data will be stored that leaves a record of when you opened the refrigerator and when you flushed the toilet. Google is well down the road to developing the internet connected automobile. We are going to be forced to develop a new understanding of our basic notions about personal privacy.
This stored data is not in some huge formless pile in a warehouse somewhere that would make it difficult to fish out any particular piece unless people already and a name and identifying information. The vast power of computer networks has created to capability to perform complicated data mining on vast databases. You can correlate people who bought books on Japanese cooking with their civic club membership and shoe size. This is now routinely done for marketing purposes. At a very low cost they generate a long list of what look like off the wall correlations and start looking through them for possible marketing campaigns. The same approach could be used to look for people who look politically suspicious to somebody.
Companies like Google use the information they collect about you to target you to receive ads for which they charge money. For most people the thought of that is not much more than mildly annoying. The thing that we need to focus on is that the technology that is used for that can be used for other purposes that have real potential to do us personal harm. That is not an exaggeration and it is not a conspiracy theory. This is a new reality with which human societies have never had to contend on such a scale.
I don't have a list of 10 things that we need to do about all this. I do think that we need to pull our heads out of the sand and become better informed about what is going on and become engaged as citizens in seeking the best possible laws and policies. Just leaving it to the nice people in charge is NOT a good idea.