Some time ago,
the then President Judge of Washington County scheduled a seminar to introduce
the new digital electronic system, designed to replace stenographers in the
courtroom, to the lawyers. To explain
the bells and whistles of the installation she invited a technician from Beaver
County, where the same system was in use, to discuss the Beaver County
experience. It was discovered during the
presentation that technicians sitting in the control room to monitor the system
could overhear conversations in the courtrooms even when the system was not
recording, an operational detail not known by the lawyers or even the judges. When the Beaver technician was asked about
this, his incredulous response was: “well when it comes to protecting
privileged information we are not permitted to hear, obviously you have to
trust us to do the right thing.”
I keep thinking
of this response from a technician, operating under little legal or
administrative oversight, as our country continues its post 9/11 journey into
the new age of high tech surveillance. When
it comes to reviewing constitutionally
protected personal data, who do we trust to do the right thing? What are the actual parameters of the
surveillance that would differentiate between legal civil disobedience and
illegal terrorism? What is the screening
process and when are the hits on innocent citizens deleted? Are the nuts and
bolts of American national security policy kept secret from us for protection,
or to keep illegal conduct from coming to light? If neither the so called war
on terror nor the Patriot Act affects most of us, should we even care, as long
as security concerns are limited to information and do not take away our right
to bear arms.
Surveillance
technology is expanding at breakneck speed.
Constructing a real time representation of the world, no doubt the ultimate
goal of the NSA and other security organizations, requires a large and growing
amount of data (big data) and a system to give meaning to the data (algorithms). Big data has involved the universal
collection of phone and computer records for some time. As reported in a recent
Foreign Affairs article, The Violence of Algorithms, Taylor Owen, 5/25/15,
data collection is now also enhanced by:
“a network of 100 toaster sized satellites that will take daily high
resolution images of everywhere on earth. The goal is to launch thousands- a
persistent real time surveillance tool.” Regarding algorithms the author points
out: “If they (algorithms) are biased, flawed, or based on incorrect data, then
the human will be just as wrong as the machine.”
So even the
technician who means well may make bad choices and come down on the wrong side
of our civil liberties if an algorithm exposes an innocent individual. Consider
the farmer in Iowa who plugs the word “Isis” into Google (another algorithm) to
learn more about the organization because his son is doing humanitarian work in
the Mid East. The same day, big data
picks up an e-mail conversation with his son; “we need to eliminate all the weeds and buy
a half ton of nitrates for next
year’s crops.” This pattern matches a
well thought out terrorist algorithm and all of the farmer’s conversations,
bank statements and travel plans are monitored and read by a young technician
in Alexandria Virginia. Should the
farmer just “trust him” to do the right thing?
How about the
technician who is working for an executive who does not mean well? It was not that long ago that Richard Nixon and
J Edgar Hoover sought to gain as much information as possible about their perceived
enemies through any means possible.
Would anyone feel comfortable with these new technologies in their
hands?
Some are not happy with this new reality. It has been reported that in Germany, as
troublesome as the East German Stasi and Soviet KGB were during the cold war,
the German government felt more secure from spying in the past than during the
recent surveillance intrusions from their allies, the Americans.
Our own citizens do not seem to have
the same doubts or concerns as new and more invasive spy techniques are
revealed. Why are we willing to give up protected information concerning our
private lives to technicians in secret control rooms on the slim chance of
avoiding an Islamist plot?
I believe several factors are in play. First,
many buy into the claim that we are at war and believe it is patriotic to
cooperate since we have “nothing to hide”. Second, the pervasive use of social media has
degraded privacy concerns and surveillance is often viewed as harmless national
data sharing. Third, everyone gets to
keep their firearms, no matter how onerous the data collection.
There is great
irony in the fact that in dangerous times to the homeland, gun ownership is not
restricted. We insist that we be permitted to keep unfettered, the one instrumentality
that causes a thousand times more carnage than terrorism. Even knowing that a
bad guy is more likely to use a gun against an innocent rather than blown
him/her up, firearms get a pass. It remains
an open question whether more gun restriction and less surveillance would lower
the number of attacks inspired by radical ideologies.
In the United
States, the right to bear arms is sacrosanct and this is not about to change
until fiscal conservatives realize that curtailing guns will save millions in
social welfare and make us safer. In the mean time, If big brother gets out of
hand with this surveillance stuff, we can always shoot him.
