Who’s watching you? When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents that revealed a vast spying operation by the NSA, he prompted a renewed debate over the balance of security and privacy. For insight on the topic, we turned to two Tech experts.
Sy Goodman: Think Beyond ‘Big Brother’
In 1949, George Orwell published 1984, depicting a future Stalinist society characterized by its use of advanced information and communications technologies for ubiquitous data collection, information control and manipulation, and surveillance. In (the year) 1984 I was asked to address the reality of such an Orwellian society in the Soviet Union. I concluded that the USSR was far from it, due to severe technological limitations (they did more with paper and informants), but that the United States was closer.
Much “progress” has been made toward the three ubiquities since then, enabled by a vast spectrum of technological development. The availability of digital storage is approaching infinite and free, and it is becoming more trouble to delete information than to keep it forever. Similar observations can be made about devices, particularly mobile phones and cameras, bandwidth, search procedures and massive forms of connectivity.
Another difference between the present day and the worlds of both 1984 and 1984 is who is doing the data-collecting. Beyond “Big Brother” governments, the cast now includes many players in the private and public sectors. It was inevitable that they would devise business models to take advantage of the possibilities that technological development afforded. For several national security agencies, this meant devoting enormous resources to looking for terrorists in cyberspace, which involves plowing through what the rest of us of do there as well. Businesses have become similarly motivated in their own domains.
There are several ways in which these volumes of data are collected. We put it in ourselves, e.g., via Facebook or blogs. “They” watch us make choices, e.g., recording our points and clicks. “They” watch our traffic patterns or collect records on financial transactions. “They” just watch us, e.g., with camera surveillance in public spaces or GPS tracking of cell phones. “They” are organizations that collect directly, who buy or steal the data from the original collectors, and others who search for or inject (e.g., spyware and malware) lots of stuff online.
These strategies have been successful enough, however defined, so that the different collectors push to excess, seemingly oblivious to anything other than their own goals, leading to damage like in the recent Edward Snowden incident. Such turmoil notwithstanding, it is not clear if most Americans have problems with the ubiquities, or if the current crisis will result in a long-term correction, or if it is just a hiccup in the trends toward ubiquitous data collection and surveillance.
Sy Goodman is a professor of international affairs and computing at Georgia Tech.
Chris Klaus, Cls 96: Ask the Tough Questions
Edward Snowden’s release of top secret documents has opened up a legitimate debate on our Fourth Amendment rights (prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause) and any implied rights to privacy, versus the government’s need for information and data sourcing in the context of its Global War on Terrorism. In light of this, there are several questions that need to be raised.
From the Snowden disclosure, the American public and the rest of the world learned of widespread and far-reaching surveillance being conducted by the U.S. government. However, without all of the facts and justifications for the government’s decisions, it’s difficult for the public to have an open debate on the proper balance between privacy and the War on Terror. One troubling outcome of these actions is potential for trampling on both the Fourth Amendment rights and any implied rights of privacy without any real checks and balances that have historically been incorporated into our system.
More than 4 million government employees and 500,000 government contractors have top-secret clearance. Based on the Snowden disclosures, the National Security Agency is sharing U.S. citizens’ communication data not only with the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Agency and Department of Homeland Security, but also with many other national governments, including those of Israel, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. With the vast sharing of top secret data, who is protecting the rights of the U.S. citizen? And how does one protect themselves from potential abuses by the government?
It’s very easy to lose trust and very hard to gain it back. With the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s encryption standards being compromised by the NSA, NSA backdoors being added to infrastructure and protocols, and the NSA forcing our high-tech industry to share keys that compromise innocent U.S. citizens’ communications, the U.S. government is breaking the trust of its citizens and the international community. The U.S. has had significant benefits from having everyone’s trust. How will the government regain it?
The U.S. government’s justification that it can spy on foreigners creates a false sense of security that the spying doesn’t affect U.S. businesses and the American people. However, these actions are making it easy for all other countries to justify their own spying. Is the U.S. leading by example and justifying China, Russia and many other countries’ efforts to spy on our citizens as we are spying on theirs?
President Barack Obama has welcomed a debate on the balance of privacy rights of the country’s citizens versus the need for government intervention in light of the War on Terror. The documents leaked by Snowden show that the pendulum has swung toward the War on Terror, at the risk of American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights, implied rights of privacy and certain values that I believe the American public cherishes. The War on Terror needs to be looked at holistically and in depth in order to determine what kind of culture and society we want to live in. We need to ask the tough questions and start this debate, as it has huge implications on the freedoms of people everywhere.
Chris Klaus founded Internet Security Systems, which was sold to IBM in 2006.
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In a sense Snowden was like Paul Revere warning the American country-side of an invasion of our privacy, The danger is that even if the threat of terrorism subsides in the future, you can be sure that
having spent billions on developing such an all-encompassing network, they will not dismantle it. It will be “re-purposed” to who knows what nefarious end, The military-industrial complex Eisenhaur warned us about is being superseded by a military-informational complex. Snowden is not the first patriot to sacrifice himself on the alter of freedom-nor will he be the last.