This is a problem...but not quite for the reason you might be thinking.
It seems to me that, as the future becomes more futuristic, with phones and phone-like-devices being stuck into everything, we have good stuff. Ease of communication, the ability to take data and use it for good (which can happen) and generally increased efficiency in our machines and our lives. Plus, nifty gizmos and music players.
This is cool!
What is LESS cool is the fact that data collection cuts both ways. You can gather information to help people - tracking illnesses, or crimes, or something - and you can use it to control people by tracking political thought, private activities, and economic actions.
However...I'm not so sure we can stop the creation of a panopticon, because it is already here in a way. It's laughably easy to track huge amounts of information, and the people who want that information currently have the power to make more of it come in.
I think stopping the government from doing it is fine...but Verizon is still going to be able to collect it and use it for their own ends!
If you ask me, what we need to do is find a way for us to use the panopticon to our advantage. And, in a way, we've already started that with things like wikileaks or the continual breaking of twitter based stories that dump huge amounts of information into our daily lives.
So...basically, I think privacy might be dead...but it might be okay, if we can use it to empower ourselves against people who would use it to control us by continually monitoring them and taking organized political action against them.
Whether we can actually DO that is entirely an open question...
I think, before we ask if we
can do it, we first need to ask if we
will do it. The problems with the undermining of liberty and democracy, whether by government or by corporate interests, are fueled by people's blindness to what's being done around them and/or inaction in response to it.
You know what disturbs me most? This: The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
If its a TOP SECRET order, how the fock did the Guardian get a hold of it? There's a horrible hole in security there. I'd hope our government is investigating that.
And if anyone is upset about this, thank all in Congress who voted in the initial Patriot Act. That was the slippery slope.
I agree. The PATRIOT Act shouldn't exist in the first place. I don't buy all the official shock-horror that it's coming home to roost now, especially since the members of the Intelligence Committee were certainly briefed on the April court order and signed off on the whole program, so -- what? This is a surprise? I don't think so.
That said, I just today watched a discussion about this on Alex Wagner's show on MSNBC, and I have to say I am of two minds about it, neither one particularly panicky.
On the one hand, I think the Obama admin is being way over-broad in its reach on this. This is just the latest example of Obama's penchant for fishing expeditions. I understand the impulse and I also accept the WH's assurances that they have taken precautions to avoid negative effects on innocent parties, but I don't think they are on as solid legal footing as they may think they are. Why? Precisely because their Constitutional footing is even shakier, probably non-existent. Dragnets are never a good tactic, for many reasons.
As I understand the analysis I heard today, the feature of this secret court order that I'm focused on is that it is a single order allowing for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of instances of surveillance under one order. This not only allows the admin to potentially violate the Constitution hundreds of thousands of times before any review comes into play, but also coyly sidesteps the requirement for reports to Congress on how many telcom surveillance orders are being issued. "Oh, we'll just take care of all the surveillance on one order, and that'll look better, wink-wink. It's not breaking the rules." Lawyers love that kind of letter-of-the-law shit, but like dragnet searches, they are bad policy and bring all kinds of bad results.
So this is a bad habit of the current admin that needs to be broken asap so that no later admins take it up.
On the other hand, I'm so far the minority voice on this in this thread, but I really don't have that much of a problem with surveillance of this kind. I mean, I do have problems with it, but not to the degree that many others do.
Privacy, like safety, is by and large a cootie-wootie, i.e. an illusion. I think a lot of people like the idea of privacy more than they worry about or even understand the reality of it. So often these days, the same people will rail against being watched by CCTV on the streets, yet hand out their banking and personal information and pictures of themselves doing all sorts of stuff on the internet willy-nilly. The same people don't want Big Brother knowing about their personal interests but leave internet histories of porn, shopping, job search, and chat sites on their work computers. The same people worry about the government invading their homes with secret warrants and tracking their personal lives, while freely announcing their travel plans, how long they'll be away from home, who they're having sex with and who they're no longer having sex with, how many minor frauds and drug crimes they perpetrated this month, etc, on Facebook and other social media.
It's frustrating to watch so many people rant angrily against the government taking away their privacy while they themselves are abandoning it to parties just as invasive, insidious and dangerous, if not more so.
So for me, the problem is not that broad-based surveillance is happening in the name of security. I define my privacy very specifically. I have set limits beyond which, if my information is taken by others without my knowledge or permission, that could be bad for me. They cover my finances, my medical history, when I'm away from home, proofs of my ID which could be stolen, things like that. To me, privacy on such things is not optional. On everything else, it basically is.
I say it's no one else's business what my politics are, for instance, or what my sex life is like, or who my friends are, or what brands I buy, but I personally do not keep such things secret, so I personally don't care if they get bandied about in other places. Other people feel differently, but again, to me it's optional.
Beyond that sphere of personal information, there's also the stuff I do in public, like walk the streets, commute, attend events, and so forth. Here's the other end of the privacy spectrum, as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see any logical sense in people claiming an expectation of privacy for things they do in public, surrounded by other people. Yes, what I do on my weekends is personal information, but if I'm out in public where all can see me doing my stuff, I don't see how I can possibly claim my activities are private. So I tend to have very little patience with privacy arguments against things like CCTV surveillance.
Now to this present issue, the WH claims that they are only looking at external information -- numbers called, length of calls, things like that. They claim they are not listening to the calls themselves. To me, this kind of external watching is not a serious problem. This is exactly what the Bush admin did, and I didn't have a problem with it then, either. What I had a problem with was the complete secrecy of the Bush/Cheney program and the lack of judicial oversight. I would say I have the same opinion on the Obama version of it. I do not have a problem with that level of surveillance if indeed it goes only as deep as claimed. What I do have a problem with is the over-broad and over-sized reach of the present program because that's just another, less direct way of avoiding oversight.
So my opinion on all this is that, once again, the outcry in defense of privacy is focusing on a phantom problem while ignoring real ones. There is a legitimate debate to be had over the necessity of this kind of surveillance, and how far is too far, etc. But there is also the fact, as Zoombie points out, that this surveillance has been going on for years, conducted by the service providers themselves for the purpose of profit by both using and selling our information, and none of us was ever the wiser. So should we be upset when the government is doing it, but not when Verizon et al. do it? Do we really understand how the telcom systems work so we can understand what's happening and how it really affects our privacy? What, exactly, will this do to us?
Personally, I don't care if giant, faceless, corporate and/or government entities are watching the call logs going into and out of my phones, just as I don't care if the public streets are monitored by CCTV cameras. Of all the potential stalkers in the world, I think the government and companies that want to sell me stuff are the least dangerous.
But I do want to see the new information age develop to a point where individuals can access and search themselves in surveillance records to see who's been watching them or where they may have been exposed inappropriately. I would like to see surveillance no longer be secret. I'd like to see it regulated openly with time limits for destruction of unused records, and so forth.
I agree with Zoombie that we will probably never return to the days when it was easy to disappear for however long or short a time or to be invisible to official radars. I think it is possible to drag this emerging new normal for privacy out into the open and make it more participatory to empower citizens to protect their rights and interests. However, I think that cuts against both the legitimate concerns of security and the political tendencies of power, so it will not happen if people don't get real and practical about what privacy is and then get proactive about taking control of the system.
