“It’s slow and subtle,” writes Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez, “but surveillance societies inexorably train us for helplessness, anxiety and compliance. Maybe they’ll never look at your call logs, read your emails or listen in on your intimate conversations. You’ll just live with the knowledge that they always could — and if you ever had anything worth hiding, there would be nowhere left to hide it.”
An superb piece by Sanchez, which I’ve followed, below, with a Sanchez segment on Stossel:
Some of the potentially sensitive facts those records expose becomes obvious after giving it some thought: Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyeror an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of?
Some are less obvious. Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with.
It’s precisely this kind of analysis the NSA is likely interested in doing to help “fingerprint” either specific suspects or the general profile of a terror suspect. Link that information to other data sets being collected, like credit card bills, and you can even deduce when a woman is pregnant before her own family knows. Think of big data analysis as a statistical Sherlock Holmes, capable of making surprising inferences from seemingly insignificant details and patterns.
But fine, so what if a bunch of strangers in a room in Fort Meade could, in principle, discover these things about you? There’s no reason to think they’re digging for that kind of stuff, and even if they did, it’d be like learning there are naked photos of you circulating in a Mongolian village: A little creepy, maybe, but unlikely to have a concrete effect on your life.
Assuming you don’t match a profile that gets you flagged for more intensive surveillance, that’s probably right — as long as they’re only using that vast, rich database to look for specific terror or espionage suspects. If they change their minds about the rules governing access to the database or how it’s put to use, of course, we’re unlikely to ever know; we didn’t know what the rules were before the leak either.
That’s one problem with bulk collection of data. The information often sticks around indefinitely, while the rules only stick around until someone decides to change them. The IRS is all fired up to use big data to hunt for tax cheats, and in principle, the NSA can disseminate evidence of some crime. Sooner or later, other agencies may start to wonder why such a juicy data set is going to waste.
But the average person is unlikely to pique the NSA’s interest, even when those sweeping surveillance powers are abused for purposes ranging beyond terrorism. It probably won’t affect you personally or directly.
However, that seems like an awfully narrow way to think about the importance of privacy. Folks don’t usually say (aloud, anyway), “I’m white, why should I care about racism?” or, “My political and religious views are too mainstream to ever be restricted, so why should I care about the First Amendment?”
And watch (no transcripts, of course) Stossel, as Sanchez explains that “most cellphone carriers have the capability to install remote spyware on your cell phone,” in addition to the dozens of [other] ways we can [and are being] tracked.