The “debate” over PRISM and
other American and international snooping programs grows more pathetic by the
day, still dominated by laments over these “evil” new technologies of data
gathering and collation.
The latest “highlight” was conservative columnist
Robert Samuelson’s regretting the invention of the Internet. This is the return of the mad Irish
King Cuchulainn cursing the ocean’s waves.
The Internet, with all its dangers and
opportunities is here, Bob; get over it.
Or better, learn to manage it.
The same must be said for today’s new surveillance
technology: it exists, and any national security agency that fails to use it
should be disbanded. The question
is how are these new opportunities to monitor people and their communications
used by the NSA, its colleagues and competitors. It is a given that they can and do register and file just
about every form and piece of human communication. But, what triggers more particular and invasive attention to
people or institutions? And once
closer looks are begun, who gets access to selected materials? Who monitors the snoopers from both
inside and outside the system, and what powers do they have to rein in
irresponsible or unnecessary prying?
And who tells what about all of this to the people who, in a democracy,
should have the ultimate power and responsibility?
These are hard questions, but familiar ones, since
they recur often, whenever the balance of power between citizens and their
states is transformed by technological or cultural change.
In this case, the ongoing development of
surveillance technology and data gathering and mining, like the ongoing
development of global use of the Internet creates both dangers and
opportunities for both sides of the citizen/state balance of power.
On the one hand, for the 21st Century
and beyond, the uncomfortable fact is that personal privacy is dead, and not
just because of government supercomputers. The global distribution of mobile
phones with audio or video recording capabilities has created an environment in
which anything that happens “in public” is almost as likely to be recorded as
your “private” phone calls, texts messages, snail- and e-mails, and probably
more likely to be distributed with or without your permission.
But, there is a countervailing truth here: government
secrecy is as almost as dead as privacy; people have never-before-equaled
powers to rip the government’s blindfolds off their eyes. The fatal flaw of secret systems, that
they require human participation, and inevitably, every secret decision can
produce active dissent, is nothing new.
But what is new and growing is the ability of whistleblowers to record
events, and to distribute the recordings and their dissident criticisms to the
world at large. Thus, what really be created is a new and different balance of
powers between citizens and states, uneasy, instable, but still a balance of
powers.
And the evidence suggests, people have already
begun adapting to this new balance.
Even old folks like me have noticed that younger people have different
attitudes toward and expectations for privacy. They are prone to exhibit more of and about themselves than
their parents did. Largely this is because they can; but it also because others
can create these displays, with little to stop them, and that such exposures
create far less embarrassment or social cost. Note the political returns of Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner
and Mark Sanford, just to name 3. Every
college newspaper, it seems, has either a sex or a porn column, which trade in what
even fairly recent graduates might consider TMI, too much information.
This is not to say, there are no norms, but just
to note that, for most people under 30 the limits on personal disclosure are looser
than for older people. When it
comes to the NSA snoopers, the key task will be to determine the norms, not on
what you can do, but on what you can do without inviting real
surveillance. If you can fly
beneath that radar, and would-be terrorists have long known this and did not need
Edward Snowden to tell them to be careful, you can do almost anything you want,
until it is too late for even the most aware parents, potential employers or
professional counter-terrorists to prevent it.
So, Norms for Our Time: when you are on the phone or the Internet, assume your every
move is being turned into government data, and when you are on the street or
anywhere “in public,” assume there is a good possibility everything you say or
do is being recorded.
That’s relatively easy. Personal and cultural change is constant and people are used
to dealing with it. Much harder is
to define and apply rules and limits to powerful institutions like governments
and their often-loosely- supervised security agencies. They are much slower to understand, and
much, much slower to adapt to new
conditions than people.
After all, it has been 50 years since the US sent
troops into Vietnam, and still there has been little recognition of how changes
in communications and weapon technologies have made military invasion an
exercise in futility. The
universality of digital communication is one key reason why old war-fighting
tactics no longer work, and why local organizations cohere so successfully and
durably. The rapid escalation in
portable or “improvised” (i.e. locally sourced) firepower is another. Taken together, these changes explain
why, as I like to put it, “In today’s warfare, the visiting team never wins.”
Gone are the days of “secret wars.” If a sparrow, much less a bomb falls,
the destruction it causes will be publicly known via Twitter, Facebook and
supremely, YouTube, not just by the home folks suffering the damage, who will
inevitably be alienated from the outside forces responsible for it, but by the
“visitors’ own citizens, who will know what death and destruction are being
committed in their names.
Increasingly, Americans are coming to understand
that for every terrorist (in, or without quotation marks) killed by American
drones in northwest Pakistan, hundreds of friends, relatives and neighbors, and
hundreds of thousands of Pakistani fellow-citizens are turned into irrevocable
enemies. They can see the damage
on their TV screens, computers and mobile phones.
Similar secret US attacks inside Somalia, may have
eliminated a few terrorists, but they have also strengthened the Islamist
terrorist group Al-Shabaab’s legitimacy as an anti-imperialist force
there. Somalis, like Pakistanis,
count the collaterally dead as their friends, those who killed them as enemies,
and today’s communications technologies assure they, and anyone they can
communicate with, can count corpses as easily or efficiently as domestic spooks
can track your correspondence.
American diplomats on the ground recognize this blowback, but in
Washington, other imperatives still rule.
Between whistleblowers and video cameras,
government secrecy is dead as a doornail, or the concept of personal privacy. The Video Era, like those of such
earlier modes of communication as the human voice, the printing press, radio
and TV, has created great opportunities for the consolidation of power in those
who can control or best utilize those media. But, equally, for ordinary people the new media, each time
they change the world, also greatly empower individual communications to spread
farther faster to an ever-growing audience.
There is a new balance of power in communication
and, as Darwin noted, adaptation is the only answer.
David Marash
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