[Vision2020] The Price of the Panopticon

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 11, 2013
The Price of the Panopticon By JAMES B. RULE

BERKELEY, Calif. — THE revelation that the federal government has been
secretly gathering records on the phone calls and online activities of
millions of Americans and foreigners seems not to have alarmed most
Americans. A poll<http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptable-anti-terror-tactic/>conducted
by the Pew Research Center over the four days immediately after
the news first broke found that just 41 percent of Americans deemed it
unacceptable that the National Security Agency “has been getting secret
court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans to
investigate terrorism.”

We privacy watchers and civil libertarians think this complacent response
misses a deeply worrying political shift of vast consequence. While
President Obama has conveniently described the costs of what appears to be
pervasive surveillance of Americans’ telecommunications connections as
“modest encroachments on privacy,” what we are actually witnessing is a sea
change in the kinds of things that the government can monitor in the lives
of ordinary citizens.

The N.S.A. dragnet of “connection data” — who communicates with whom,
where, how often and for how long — aims at finding patterns between calls
or messages, and between parties with given characteristics, which
correlate with increased odds of terrorist activity. These patterns can in
turn cue authorities to focus attention on possible terrorists.

The success rate in these operations is a matter of intense speculation,
given the authorities’ closemouthed stance on the matter. But no serious
analyst can doubt that such steps may be helping to pinpoint terrorist acts
in advance, as supporters, like Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of
California, have insisted.

The question, though, is what comes next? Government planners have
apparently invested billions of dollars to develop these new surveillance
capabilities. Given the open-ended nature of this country’s relentless
campaign against terrorism and other declared evils, it would be naïve to
imagine that the state’s grip on “big data,” achieved at such cost, would
be allowed to atrophy in the foreseeable future. It is far more likely that
new uses — and, inevitably, abuses — will be found for these surveillance
techniques.

This is true even if the Obama administration’s goals are benign.
Institutions and techniques predictably outlive the intentions of their
creators. J. Edgar Hoover went before Congress in 1931 to declare that “any
employee engaged in wiretapping will be dismissed from the service of the
bureau.” A few decades later, F.B.I. agents were in full pursuit of alleged
Communist sympathizers, civil rights workers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. — using wiretapping, break-ins and other shady tactics.

We must also ask how far we want government to see into our private lives,
even in the prevention and punishment of genuine wrongdoing. The promise
that one especially egregious sort of crime (terrorism) can be predicted
and stopped can tempt us to apply these capabilities to more familiar sorts
of troublesome behavior.

Imagine that analysis of telecommunications data reliably identified
failure to report taxable income. Who could object to exploiting this
unobtrusive investigative tool, if the payoff were a vast fiscal windfall
and the elimination of tax evasion? Or suppose we find telecommunications
patterns that indicate the likelihood of child abuse or neglect. What
lawmaker could resist demands to “do everything possible” to act on such
intelligence — either to apprehend the guilty or forestall the crime.

Using surveillance for predictive modeling to prevent all sorts of
undesirable or illegal behavior is the logical next step. These
possibilities are by no means a fantastical slippery slope — indeed, the
idea of pre-empting criminals before they act was envisioned by Philip K.
Dick’s short story “The Minority Report,” later a movie starring Tom
Cruise.

Some privacy watchers have dismissed N.S.A. activities as surveillance
boondoggles, unlikely to significantly prevent terrorism. That is not my
view. Terrorism is an authentic danger — as are dangerous driving,
communicable diseases, gun violence and countless other behaviors and
tendencies that could, in principle, be combated by closer monitoring of
Americans’ communication.

But do we need, and should we tolerate, a government so powerfully and
deeply embedded in our once private lives as to spot manifestations of such
evils anywhere and everywhere, perhaps even before they occur? 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?

American life has swung before between repressive and permissive climates.
The swing toward surveillance, begun by George W. Bush, has only continued
under his successor. But even those Americans who think the supposed
trade-off between privacy and security is “worth it” need to ponder all the
likely consequences.

James B. Rule <http://www.jamesbrule.net/> is a sociologist and a scholar
at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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