Big Brother is Watching and You Know It

I am all for people being vigilant about their rights and jealous of their privacy.  I agree that government needs to be watched when it watches us.  By all means please repeatedly bash President Obama over the head with reminders that he is a raving hypocrite who, when he was a candidate, decried the very type of surveillance it is now clear his administration has been carrying out for years.  And don’t forget to castigate all of those liberals who called George W. Bush “Hitler” but who now think there is nothing wrong with a secret government surveillance program.

But let’s all be clear about two things.  First, we asked for this.  If you want to know why the government is legally allowed to do this, you simply need to look no further than the Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that the American people have repeatedly approved.  We decided that preventing people from flying planes into buildings was worth allowing the government to take a peak into anyone’s life without giving us a clue it was doing so.  We decided that getting on a plane could be akin to getting a route canal.  We decided that drones patrolling the skies and executing “kill” orders makes us all safer.  Don’t pretend that the NSA surveillance program is some kind of shocking idea that we never imagined the government would carry out.  You can’t have it both ways: you can’t say, “government, protect me from random terrorist attacks,” on the one hand, and then claim to be offended when you discover what it takes to do precisely that.

What you can do is complain when the government fails, as it did in Boston, to prevent such attacks.  There still has not been a decent explanation as to why the government was not able to foil that attack and people should be screaming for answers.  It seems as if the moment the perpetrators were caught all investigation about how that attack was able to occur stopped.  It is a far cry from the extensive investigations that happened after 9/11.  When such a “random” attack occurs, then the government has failed to live up to its end of the bargain and we should question whether the bargain is worth it.  But I don’t see people arguing against the NSA program on that basis.  Have you seen any mention of Boston in conjunction with complaints about the NSA?

The second thing we need to be clear about is our definition of “privacy.”  For all of the conveniences that technology affords to us, it also opens the door to greater exposure of people’s lives than at any other time in history.  The thing is, the exposure, for the most part, is voluntary. Telephone conversations, particularly cell phone conversations, are not private.  They use public airwaves and anyone can listen with the right equipment; it’s just that the government has better equipment to enable it to listen on a mass scale.  E-mail is not private.  It goes to central servers before it is dispatched to its intended recipients. Thus, the companies that own those servers theoretically can read any e-mail dispatched to them.  This is part of the deal with e-mail; it is nearly instantaneous, but the price for that is using a public channel of communication.  Internet searches are not private.  Google knows who is searching for what and this information tells them a lot more than you think it does.  Then there is the social media: Facebook, Twitter, and the medium you are reading right now, blogging.  By definition these forms of communication are not private, which is why people should be cautious before they volunteer information on such platforms. But a legion of examples demonstrates that people repeatedly fail to realize this fact.

It is a little difficult for me to conjure up righteous indignation for so-called “meta-surveillance” by the government when people are so willingly reveal private information on public platforms for all the world to see.  How much does the government know through the surveillance program that people don’t voluntarily reveal every day?  For the most part, the surveillance program — made possible through cooperation by the big tech companies — simply allows the information assessment to be more efficient.  Allowing such intrusions might not be worth it, but knee-jerk reactions overlook our latent acquiescence.