While we try to figure out the implications of living in a surveillance state, we can't claim we didn't see this coming. There have been plenty of stories in the news over the years, even public discussion. We expect, we DEMAND the government keep us safe whenever there's something scary "out there" (or under the bed).
The U.S. went nuts after 911 - but that's nothing new. In the 90s we got early intimations of where 911 would come from. In the 80s, has everyone forgotten the fears behind ContraGate and related matters? There was plenty of paranoia during the 60s and 70s, between the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Hippies, the Sexual Revolution... In the 50s it was the Red Scare, McCarthyism, blacklists. In the 40s it was the axis powers - Fascists in Europe, the Japanese in the Pacific (Remember Pearl Harbor!). We rounded up everyone with the least trace of Japanese ancestry and sent them off to internment camps. In the 30's it was anarchists and communists taking advantage of economic collapse - not to mention the other side of the class war. Let's not forget all the fun things from Prohibition - rum runners, organized crime, bootleggers, etc. World War I - paranoia about German spies and other threats to the established order.
Plus, let's not forget the WAR ON DRUGS!!!! and the incredibly intrusive, punitive measures that have been adopted in the name of "getting tough on crime."
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
This is not a perfect world. Humans are not angels. Shit happens. We expect the society in which we live to provide a certain amount of safety and security and order - else why would anyone put up with it? At the same time, nobody wants to give up too much of their own freedom or privacy, so ideally there are checks and balances. Accountability. The rule of law. Transparency. Informed consent.
But... for One, fear makes people crazy, stupid. Give people a big enough perceived threat, and it's amazing what they'll put up with, what they'll demand even. Two, fear and anger is a powerful tool to grab and keep power. More than one totalitarian regime has justified its existence, more than one tyrant has hung on to power by claiming that only they stood between their people and the abyss. Three, knowledge IS power - and increasingly it is money as well. (And how often do the Rich and Powerful find themselves inconvenienced?)
Ambiguity, Deniability, Trust, Oversight
As has been pointed out elsewhere, revelations that the government is intercepting phone calls, emails, internet activity, etc. etc. should not have come as a surprise; there have been repeated news stories about this. The War on Terror is still with us, the Devil's Bargain we made after 911. (Given the demonstrated character of so many in the Bush administration, calling it a Devil's Bargain seems particularly apt.)
To be fair, the Security business is in some ways a no-win situation. There's damned little credit that can be taken for things that don't happen; telling how you stopped "the bad guys" from doing something means the next crew to come along would know what they're up against. If something bad happens, everyone wants to know what went wrong and who screwed up. So, there are both positive and negative reasons for secrecy and deniability. It takes a special kind of person to assume that kind of responsibility, without abusing it OR being abused. In other words, we really need to know what kind of people we're dealing with here, who we're trusting with all this. The answers to date are not comforting.
Snowden's revelations are calling attention to more than the secret programs revealed. How exactly does someone with his background end up with that kind of access to that kind of information? How does a top secret government agency end up delegating so much of its responsibilities to a private contractor? (Talking Points Memo has some troubling details.) What exactly has Congress been doing all this time - since Congress is supposed to exercise the oversight of these activities - and what about the people reporting to Congress? Charles P. Pierce narrows in on a key moment in watching the watchers.
By any reasonable standard, and certainly by any standard currently being applied to, say, Eric Holder by, say, Ted Cruz, [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper lied to Congress in the person of Ron Wyden. Wyden gave him two chance to be honest and Clapper declined both opportunities.
Clapper then went on television and barbered the truth to Andrea Mitchell, a respected Beltway elite newsperson, which is, of course, the grievous sin of which Susan Rice has been judged guilty and sentenced to listen to a lifetime of silliness from Rand Paul. The invaluable Marcy Wheeler captured the exchange, which is absolutely fking priceless.
So, What Exactly Are They Looking At?
The short answer is we don't really know. The claim from the government is that conversations aren't being recorded (At least not all of them all the time. Maybe.) Instead it's things like who is calling who, where, when. It's looking at certain kinds of traffic on the Internet. It's about picking up patterns, tracing connections. Which, is not really all that reassuring when you think about it.
There is an article in The Scientist that gives a good example of necessary government surveillance that deals with real threats, and what exactly the point is in collecting the kind of data the NSA seems to be. Just substitute infectious disease, and how epidemics spread for terrorism, and you can begin to see what kind of insights can be gained. The article is Factoring in Face Time: How the study of human social interactions is helping researchers understand the spread of diseases like influenza and HIV.
For many pathogens, social contacts are an important component of disease transmission. From influenza to SARS, our risk of catching an infection is influenced by whom we meet and how we interact. The problem for epidemiologists, however, is that until recently there has been very little data on how people actually mix with each other. Another issue is that conversation and physical contact are not the only ways for an infection to pass between individuals. Diseases like influenza can also be picked up from viruses left on surfaces.
In recent years, researchers have begun to unravel how infections spread through a population. Plummeting sequencing costs have made it possible to sequence viral and microbial genomes from infected patients, and new survey methods are providing estimates of social interactions. Using these sources of information, epidemiologists are beginning to build a detailed picture of how social contact patterns influence outbreaks. Combining theoretical tools with large-scale data collection, these projects are providing valuable clues about how diseases spread, and how they might be stopped.
Gathering this kind of information, analyzing it, and understanding the interactions at work, identifying critical factors is an essential element of disease control. It is becoming ever more critical in a world where human population growth and
international travel is ramping up the odds that old and new plagues are developing out there with the potential to spread rapidly.
MERS is the one currently getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so.
The information that can be gained from large data sets combined with modern computing power and analytical techniques is an obvious social benefit when applied to disease control. Exactly what the NSA and other agencies are up to is a still unanswered question. New Scientist has an overview of the kinds of information being collected and some of the possible insights that can be harvested from it. The parallels with epidemic modeling are instructive, to say the least.
So How Did We Get Here?
In the 1950s at the height of the Cold War, the late science fiction/fantasy author Poul Anderson wrote a story set in a future America in which the government kept close track of everyone.
Citizen Blank Blank, Anytown, Somewhere, U.S.A., approaches the hotel desk. “Single with bath.” … …
Citizen Blank takes out his wallet, extracts his card, gives it to the registry machine, an automatic set of gestures. Aluminum jaws close on it, copper teeth feel for the magnetic encodings, electronic tongue tastes the life of Citizen Blank.
Place and date of birth. Parents. Race. Religion. Educational, military and civilian service records. Marital status. Children, Occupations, from the beginning to the present. Affiliations. Physical measurements, fingerprints, retinals, blood type. Basic psychotype. Loyalty rating. Loyalty index as a function of time to moment of last test given. Click, click. Bzzz.
“Why are you here, sir?”
“Salesman. I expect to be in Cincinnati tomorrow night.”
The clerk (32 yrs., married, two children; NB, confidential, Jewish. To be kept out of key occupations) pushes buttons.
Click, click. The machine returns the card. Citizen Blank puts it back in his wallet. …
The machine talks to itself. Click, click. A bulb winks at its neighbor as if they shared a private joke. The total signal goes out over the wires.
That was the 1950s. The government never got around to actually building a massive computer system. They didn't have to: the private sector has done it for them. The decreasing coast of computing power, the increasing digitization of information, the rise of the internet and interconnectivity, cell phones, etc. means that all that information is out there, being tracked by companies because A) we like what it can do for us, and B) they can use it to make money. All the government has to do is ask those companies to share that information - and we now know they do.
You have no secrets from your bank, your credit card company, your phone company, your internet service provider. Click on an ad in a website, and you'll find ads for that and similar things popping up all over the web from then on. Emails appear in your in box, phone calls come in, mail shows up in your mail box - and you have no idea how they got your contact information. You don't know who knows what about you, where it is, if it's wrong or right, or who else can see it. And you can't do much about it any case. Once it's out there, it's out there. The government isn't all you need to worry about. Good luck getting corporations to give a shit about your rights. Especially when the whole idea of social media is to share personal information. We do it to ourselves.
The late John Brunner wrote an incredibly prophetic book "The Shockwave Rider", about a future America barely being held together by the net, where control of information was the key to power, and most people need to take some kind of drugs just to cope with the stress. It's a must read if you want to grasp the implications of where we're headed. (pdf version here.) Considering it was written in 1975, it's remarkable how well it holds up even today. Brunner accurately described the special kind of paranoia that comes from knowing someone, somewhere knows something absolutely vital to you - and you have no idea who they are or what the information is.
The Horns of the Dilemma
I mentioned at the intro to this rather longish diary that fear can make people stupid and crazy - but what if you have valid reasons for fear? I mentioned the possibility of plague - biotechnology is now at the point where we've pretty well figured out how to make a flu virus strain that is both deadly and highly communicable. Further, that technology is becoming more accessible, less expensive every day. Somebody needs to be keeping an eye on this. Much the same could be said about any kind of technology.
The Boston Marathon Bombers used information from the internet in part to assemble their bombs. Personal cell phone cameras, surveillance cameras around the area, made identifying them happen incredibly quickly. It also led to a flash mob effect when someone was incorrectly tagged. The 911 bombers showed how a commercial airliner could be transformed into a weapon of mass destruction; cell phones alerted passengers to what was happening on the doomed plane that crashed in Pennsylvania because they acted to keep it from reaching its target.
Information is power. Always has been, always will be. We live in an age of information - we can't maintain our civilization without it. Who watches the watchers? Who do we trust, and how do we hold them accountable? Charles P. Pierce has a must-read commentary that addresses the Snowden revelations: Tell Me What Is Being Done In My Name. Read the whole thing. It starts with these words:
OK, let us persist in the notion that I am an American citizen. Let us persist in the notion that I am the citizen of a self-governing political commonwealth. Let us persist in the notion that I have a say -- and important and equal say -- in the operation of my government here and out in the world. Let us persist in the notion that, in America, the people rule. If we persist in these notions -- and, if we don't, what's the fking point, really? -- then there is only one question that I humbly ask of my government this week.
Please, if it's not too damn much trouble, can you tell me what's being done in my name?
Those of us who were around in the 1960's are having a bit of deja vu right now. I'll close this with the opening sequence of a TV series that is perhaps more relevant than ever. The dialog beginning at 2:06 is a set of questions and answers we're still wrestling with.
http://youtu.be/...