“I’m often asked the question, ‘What’s more important-civil liberties or national security?’ It’s a false question; it’s a false choice. At the end of the day, we must do both, and they are not irreconcilable.”
–John C. Inglis, NSA deputy director, January 2009
The year 2013 was a watershed year for the issue of privacy. Until then, most Americans assumed their privacy was a basic right protected by the Fourth Amendment of the constitution, and enshrined in our political culture and societal values. Many citizens were certainly aware of so-called “big data”—the sophisticated information mining and algorithms used by Silicon Valley firms to track our proclivities and preferences, primarily for online commerce and marketing. Yet aside from a few observers, most of us accepted this technology as benign, or at worst, mildly annoying.
This state of affairs changed irrevocably in 2013 with the Global Surveillance Disclosures, a shocking cache of authenticated documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. These documents exposed a secret global surveillance network operated by a consortium of governmental intelligence agencies from Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States, among others. These documents revealed a massive surveillance program operated with the tacit consent, if not explicit participation, of private technology and telecommunications firms. In fact, some companies even received direct cash payments from the NSA for allowing access to private data. Suddenly, the harvesting of online and cellular information appeared far less innocuous. Snowden was promptly charged with espionage and found political asylum in Russia, where he remains to this day.
The political fallout from these revelations was enormous. President Obama quickly attempted to justify the US surveillance efforts, explaining that the government had no interest in spying on ordinary Americans, but rather was seeking patterns of “metadata” that could prove crucial in matters of counterterrorism and national security. Obama claimed Snowden’s actions brought “more heat than light” and defended the NSA’s controversial practices. Nonetheless, in May of 2015, a federal appeals court ruled that the NSA’s collection of bulk data was illegal and ordered the program shut down.
Once exposed, government and law enforcement predictably invoked national security, “law and order,” and safety to justify their arguably intrusive harvesting of private information. Indeed, national security has since become the perennial flipside to privacy. While the two values are now generally understood to be in tension, this has not always been the case in our nation’s history. The current paradigm of “privacy versus security” began in earnest shortly after another pivotal moment in US history: the 9/11 attacks.
On October 26, 2001, George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law. (Its full title is Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.) This law provided federal and local law enforcement with broad latitude to circumvent existing laws restricting surveillance. The Patriot Act also enabled the collection of bulk data, the monitoring of foreign nationals, wiretapping, and other intelligence gathering tools. Proponents praised this measure as the proper recalibration of security versus liberty in a new, more dangerous world order. Defenders of civil liberties argued that the act violated the Bill of Rights. According to polling, the majority of American citizens were comfortable with the Patriot Act, despite the concessions to privacy it entailed. Thus began the descent into the surveillance culture eventually exposed by Snowden.
Of course, in an age when periodic terror attacks are a reality, safety and security cannot be taken lightly, even if this requires some concessions to privacy. Such would be the clear-cut conclusion, if the success rates of data collection and video surveillance were not so decidedly mixed. For example, in notable cases such as the Boston Marathon bombing, video surveillance was instrumental in identifying the perpetrators. However, in the vast majority of counterterrorism cases, traditional means of intelligence such as community policing and embedded agents have yielded far better results. Only an estimated 3 percent of antiterrorist tips were aided by NSA bulk surveillance. In the United Kingdom, surveillance cameras are ubiquitous. Nonetheless, peer-reviewed studies have concluded that the effect of widespread surveillance on crime rates is statistically insignificant.
If increased surveillance violates privacy and does not yield particularly impressive results, why is it such a priority to continue? Some have suggested that in a society marked by radically unequal wealth distribution, powerful surveillance is a way to ensure that mass movements do not gain significant traction. For elites, this is a cheaper way to retain power than the granting of material concessions to placate a potentially violent oppressed population. Even if we dismiss such suspicions as conspiratorial, the collection of data is nonetheless highly profitable in the private and public sector alike. Finally, there is the technological capability and the abstract pursuit of “pure” information to contend with. If we have the capability to learn so much about ourselves, why should a potentially antiquated notion like privacy stand in the way?
These are the questions to consider as you examine the viewpoints contained herein. As many have stated, just because you have nothing to hide does not mean that the implications of diminished privacy are not serious—and even dangerous.