Security Shouldn't Trump Privacy - But I'm Afraid It Will
Oct 28, 2013 Jean-Louis Gassée Monday Note
The NSA and security agencies from other countries are shooting for total surveillance, for complete protection against terrorism and other crimes. This creates the potential for too much knowledge falling one day in the wrong hands.
An NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, takes it upon himself to gather a mountain of secret internal documents that describe our surveillance methods and targets, and shares them with journalist Glenn Greenwald. Since May of this year, Greenwald has provided us with a trickle of Snowden's revelations - and our elected officials, both here and abroad, treat us to their indignation.
What have we learned? We Spy On Everyone.
We spy on enemies known or suspected. We spy on friends, love interests, heads of state, and ourselves. We spy in a dizzying number of ways, both ingenious and disingenuous.
(Before I continue, a word on the word "we". I don't believe it's honest or emotionally healthy to say "The government spies". Perhaps we should have been paying more attention, or maybe we should have prodded our solons to do the jobs we elected them for - but let's not distance ourselves from our national culpability.)
You can read Greenwald's truly epoch-making series On Security and Liberty in The Guardian and pick your own approbations or invectives. You may experience an uneasy sense of wonder when contemplating the depth and breadth of our methods, from cryptographic and social engineering exploits (doubly the right word), to scooping up metadata and address books and using them to construct a security-oriented social graph.
We manipulate technology and take advantage of human foibles; we twist the law and sometimes break it, aided by a secret court without opposing counsel; we outsource our spying by asking our friends to suck petabytes of data from submarine fiber cables, data that's immediately combed for keywords and then stored in case the we need to "walk back the cat".
The reason for this panopticon is simple: Terrorists, drugs, and "dirty" money can slip through the tiniest crack in the wall. We can't let a single communication evade us. We need to know everything. No job too small, no surveillance too broad.
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