Why Is The Surveillance State Necessary?

What ‘s
Wrong Today:

On
Memorial Day the Wrongologist posted this cartoon which demonstrates the arc of
our losses in our many wars:

We
lost 116,000 in the Wrongologist’s grandfather’s war. We lost 405,000 people in
WWII, the Wrongologist’s father’s war. We lost them in about 3½ years. If you brought the 1940’s population forward
to today, that would be like losing 1 million Americans. We lost 58,000 in Vietnam, the Wrongologist’s
war.

These
numbers reflect part of the price Americans paid back then. Leaving aside the
arguments about wars of choice or wars of necessity, we largely accepted those
costs.

The
cartoon also serves to remind us of how
few people have died in the Global War on Terror. In the GOWT, we lost
3000 people on 9/11 and have lost 4,500 Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan in
the past 12 years. This is not to minimize the loss of a single life, but to
bring some perspective to where we are today, 7500 deaths over 12 years equates
to 52 deaths per month, 624 per year on average, compared to 405,000 in 3½
years in the 1940’s. We lost 4,800 on
average for each year of the Vietnam war.

This
loss of human life has been joined with the loss of constitutional freedoms
since 9/11. This came back into focus this week, as we learned about NSA’s
activities from Edward
Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower. The surveillance state grew exponentially
after 9/11. Many people have said, “I don’t care what the government does, as
long as it keeps me safe.” From Corrente:

[after 9/11]…we start
compromising our civil liberties right and left. What’s wrong with us? Where’s
our sense of who we are?…Right now we lose more than 30,000 to auto
accidents, more than 30,000 to domestic gun violence, and 55,000 to lack of
health insurance, each and every year.

So, why have we been so willing to give up
constitutional freedoms to prosecute this “war”? Again, we can’t minimize the
loss of 624 people per year for the past 12 years to fighting terrorism, but have
we lost our sense of proportionality? Are deaths from terror different from
battlefield deaths? Does the possibility that New York, Boston or DC can be
battlefields make a qualitative difference? Enough of a difference to gut the 4th
Amendment, weaken the 1st Amendment or defang Habeas Corpus?

Snowden’s
whistle-blowing has brought important issues back into public view. The NSA receives
Verizon’s call detail records along with those of all other major
telecommunications providers. It stores all information on who talks with whom,
from where to where, by what means, when and for how long. These are the
meta-data of the calls, not the actual spoken content of the calls, although
those can and may well be tapped elsewhere or by other means.

The
NSA also sucks
user data from all major Internet services, although Google’s Chief Counsel
denied that yesterday on NPR’s The
News Hour. It also taps into various commercial databases, personal medical
data and into the records of air lines and other transportation services.

It does
all this permanently and on a
global basis. The collecting is not
restricted to “foreigners”.

That is
scary but that is not yet the total observation state. Edward Snowden points
to a different danger of such secret data accumulation: (emphasis by the
Wrongologist)

[Snowden]
said the [analysts and governments] labored under a false premise that “if a surveillance
program produces information of value, it legitimizes it. . . . In
one step, we’ve managed to justify the operation of the Panopticon.”

The
Panopticon is a architectural concept for a prison where the guards can watch,
unseen by the inmates, from a tower in the middle into all cells built in a
circle around the tower. It leaves the inmates in a perceived state of permanent surveillance.

Wikipedia describes the Panopticon: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

…a type of institutional building designed
by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy
Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a
watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an
institution without them being able to
tell whether or not they are being watched.

Bentham devoted
most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is
his prison which is most widely understood by the term. Bentham described the
Panopticon as:

…a new mode of obtaining power of mind over
mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.

Terrorism
is an authentic danger that can be combated by closer monitoring of Americans’
communication. But do we need, or can we tolerate, a government so powerfully and
deeply embedded in our private lives that they can spot manifestations of such
evils anywhere and everywhere, perhaps even before they occur? Are we willing
to go that far to be “kept safe” from any danger?

From James
B. Rule in the NYT:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

How ready and able
are we to fend off the overextension and abuse of that knowledge? Who watches
the watchers? And how are we to weigh the prospective losses to communal bonds
and trust in our communities and our institutions, in a world without the buffer against state intervention that privacy
affords?

From
today’s NYT editorial:

The issue is not
whether the government should vigorously pursue terrorists. The question is
whether the security goals can be achieved by less-intrusive or sweeping means,
without trampling on democratic freedoms and basic rights. Far too little has
been said on this question by the White House or Congress in their defense of
the NSA’s dragnet.

The
President and members of Congress have said we need to have a debate about the
limits of state surveillance. That debate should define what Mr.
Obama means when he points out we
can’t have 100% privacy and 100% safety.

Politicians: Stop falling over each
other to tell us how much you want to have this debate. We will only have
it because of Snowden’s leak, not because many of you think the process of data
collection should be made public.

If we are to have a national discussion
(and we should), we need answers to these questions:

Are the
calls and texts of ordinary Americans mined for patterns that might put
innocent people under suspicion?

Why are data
from every phone call collected, and not just those made by people whom the
government suspects of terrorist activity?

How long are
the data kept, and can it be used for routine police investigations?

With those
answers, we can begin to decide if they are doing this solely to protect us, or
to try to control us.

We
shouldn’t shrug off our weakened 4th Amendment rights as a side
effect of the digital age. We must fight to preserve as much of our personal
information as possible. So if there is a benefit to learning about the NSA’s
activities, it serves as a reminder that the government is serious about obtaining
information in its war on terrorism and that we must be aware of what’s going on and must have a role in setting
limits on it.

Tyranny
is the existence and use of arbitrary Government power against citizens. The
heart of such arbitrary power is secret laws, secretly interpreted, and
secretly enforced. The Bush and Obama administration’s development of the FISA
and Patriot Acts into a structure in US law is a tyranny and makes a mockery of the US
Constitution.

We
must place limits on these programs before they get out of control. We need to
start by revisiting the Patriot Act.