NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] NSA, FBI, the American People, and Double Secret Probation
NSA, FBI, the American People, and Double Secret Probation
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001061.html
Since the latest ramping up of concerns regarding the entire gamut of
issues surrounding the surveillance activities of USA law enforcement
and intelligence agencies (and by extension, similar activities
conducted by the equivalent agencies in other countries), untold
millions of words on these topics have been spoken and written,
including some thousands of my own.
And -- all over the world -- we can argue pretty much until the cows
come home about what was legal, what wasn't legal, how much government
leaders knew or should have known, and why members of the public paid
so little attention to laws openly passed that specifically authorized
such activities.
Here in the USA, public observers of the PATRIOT and Homeland Security
Acts should have been well aware of what FBI, NSA, and other agencies
were being ordered to do by Congress -- despite current dissembling by
some of those laws' authors. We warned of these programs at the time.
And odds are, most or all of these activities will ultimately be
declared legal by the courts.
It can be argued that one clear benefit of Edward Snowden's leaks was
to confirm in some detail (significantly diluted by various related
wildly hyperbolic claims and erroneous interpretations) that such
programs in one respect or another had actually been implemented and
deployed.
Yet this still doesn't get us to the heart of the matter, to the
foundational questions we must ask ourselves no matter what our
nationality and personal feelings about our own nation's intelligence
operations.
To really get there, we need to revisit a concept made famous in the
classic film "Animal House" from 1978 -- "double secret probation."
As the character of Dean Wormer explained -- freely paraphrased by
yours truly -- double secret probation is essentially the condition of
not even knowing that you are under suspicion, and that you are the
subject of continuing investigation outside the normal context of
traditional law enforcement activities.
Of course, Wormer was talking about a rather freewheeling fraternity,
not the American people in general. But the analogy still seems apt,
and is at the heart of our dilemma regarding government surveillance.
First, only an utter fool would argue that there is no need for any
surveillance in any context, given the real world of terrorism, black
market fissile materials, and all manner of other genuine threats.
Secondly, stipulating that actual threats do exist is by no means to
agree that every asserted threat being waved as an excuse for
surveillance is genuine or not overstated, especially given the vast
amounts of power and money deeply entangled with agencies' adversarial
claims.
And at the core of our attempts to harmonize these two realities is
our friend double secret probation.
For it is frequently not the existence of government surveillance per
se that is so problematic, it is the deployment of such surveillance
without the public being clearly and definitively aware that the
surveillance is taking place, rendering us impotent to fulfill our
oversight of government that makes all the difference between
democracy and tyranny.
Significantly, many of our government leaders have put themselves into
the role of Dean Wormer -- and placed their entire citizenry on
"double secret probation" -- not trusting the people to appropriately
judge the actual threats or to accede to a level of surveillance
activities that can be reasonably justified.
It is precisely this attitude -- again even more so than the actual
surveillance much of the time -- that is so unacceptable and insulting
to us all.
Once this attitude has taken hold, it tends to spread and permeate
legislators and other government officials, who become convinced that
only they are capable of making these decisions, that the people
cannot be trusted to even know what's in their own best interests.
So we see spectacles like major Internet firms begging for the right
to even explain in broad terms what sorts of information demands are
actually made of them by governments, and Kafkaesque legal arguments
by agencies attempting to prevent the public from gaining any
practical sense of the full extent to which telephone and Internet
systems are under metadata and/or content-based observation and data
collection.
Some hardcore surveillance proponents argue that more transparency in
these realms would compromise the efficacy of their information
gathering efforts. And they may be correct, to one extent or
another -- in various specific situations.
But simply being "correct" in this context is not enough. In fact,
all of government -- at least democratically oriented governments --
must ultimately be based on compromise (a fact apparently forgotten by
many participants, to be sure), and this means that even surveillance
based on seemingly laudable motives must take a back seat to the
people who are supposed to be driving this bus -- the public itself.
Appropriate transparency about surveillance doesn't mean revealing
deep operational details, but it does require making sure that the
public understands what is actually being done.
If you want to collect our telephone calls, Internet, and other
transactional metadata and/or content, then make your case -- we the
people will make the decisions. We're the ones who pay your salaries.
Your positions exist with our concurrence, not the other way around.
We are, frankly, at least as intelligent as you are.
And if the result of the transparency we demand is that you cannot
achieve quite the level of all-encompassing surveillance of which you
dream -- so be it.
In the name of democracy, and here in the USA the Constitution and
civil rights, you must come to terms with the fact that imperfection
in surveillance is part and parcel with the fundamental precepts of
our nation.
So to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and Congress -- discuss
with us the kinds of surveillance you feel are genuinely needed.
Treat the American people as your partners, not as your adversaries or
village idiots.
If your arguments are valid, we'll back you to the hilt.
But we demand balance not banality, reasonable transparency not legal
trickery.
We're all in this together.
And with all due respect, to use the vernacular -- please stop jerking
us around.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
_______________________________________________
nnsquad mailing list
http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad