Through the Looking Glass

Scott Hardie | June 8, 2013
Three questions now that PRISM is a top story:

1) How were the companies compelled to participate? I'm sure that attorneys for the federal government can be very intimidating, but any attempt to prosecute these companies for non-compliance with a subpeona would have revealed the existence of the PRISM operation. Even if they conducted a secret trial, any fines or other punishment would have turned up on the very public books of some very famous companies. I've heard it said that Apple only caved in to years of pressure after Steve Jobs died, and that well-known privacy advocate Twitter was not involved, and that a key reason PRISM was top-secret (according to the leaked PowerPoint slides) was to keep the identities of the participating companies a secret for their own protection. All of this makes me suspect that the program was kind of sort of voluntary, which would make these companies the real bad guys here.

2) Does no one consider it wrong that we're monitoring everything that foreigners do online? Sure, not everybody is up in arms about this program: It's been pointed out that we share our data with companies and expect them to share it with others, and the government could be thought of as just another company. But of the people who are angry and worried, almost all of the concern seems to focus on potential ramifications for American citizens, instead of actual ramifications for foreigners. If it's wrong to monitor what people do online without specific, credible concern that they're going to commit a crime, then it's wrong for everyone and not just Americans. My friend Wes in Florida talks to his sister Kim in Germany all the time; we would be mad to learn that the German government was monitoring everything Wes wrote, so why aren't we mad about the prospect of the American government monitoring everything Kim writes? We do realize that if the rest of the world stops using American Internet companies because of the PR fallout from this, there will be significant harm to that sector of our economy, right? We do realize that we've lost all standing to complain about China or other foreign nations hacking into our computer networks, right?

3) Can anything stop this kind of spying? Congress has passed laws permitting this program, but that doesn't make it constitutional; the ACLU or other litigators could take this spying to court and might get it ruled unconstitutional. But even if that happened, wouldn't the spying just continue under some other made-up legal rationale? I cannot imagine these tools being set aside now that they've been developed; even if a politician had the backbone to close the entire NSA, other agencies would pick up where they left off. We as a society used to talk about the military-industrial complex being an unstoppable juggernaut that would continue amassing power forever, and I would say that the intelligence-technology complex is the modern equivalent. A friend pointed out that we do object to privacy intrusions when they go too far, like the full-body scanners at airports that are now being phased out due to public outcry, but I believe we can only object to what we know about: If the TSA could have run full-body scans from behind an airport wall without any traveler seeing the machine or posing for it, we would only learn of their existence when someone leaked it to the press.

Scott Hardie | June 10, 2013
4) This is more of a curiosity than a mystery: What kind of "unfair trial" did Edward Snowden mean? He says that he traveled to Hong Kong before leaking the documents because he did not expect to receive a "fair trial" in any U.S. courtroom. But he also went public with his identity and location, saying that he knew he was breaking the law and expected to be charged with a crime that carries a decade sentence for each leaked document. So, if he had no chance of being acquitted anyway, and if his sentence would have put him in prison until his old age anyway, what possibly could have been worse about an "unfair trial"? A full life sentence? A death sentence? Solitary confinement or other torture behind bars?

Erik Bates | June 11, 2013
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Samir Mehta | June 11, 2013
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Scott Hardie | October 27, 2013
I'm twice appalled by the latest revelations, that the U.S. monitored calls by 35 world leaders: First that we had done such a thing, and second that no one I talk to seems bothered by it. That this is "expected" or "par for the course" in international diplomacy, or that one "would be surprised if we didn't spy on other leaders," does not make such a disturbingly amoral act of overreach by our government acceptable. Americans would be outraged if any of the other 35 nations was revealed to be listening in on every call made by Bush or Obama. Am I that far out of touch to consider this attitude an unfair double standard? This is a big deal.

Erik Bates | October 28, 2013
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Samir Mehta | October 28, 2013
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Scott Hardie | October 31, 2013
I don't think most Americans are indifferent to spying on individuals. I do think most people believe it's an unsolvable problem, that human nature and the corrupting influence of power will conspire to lead government agents to continue doing spying on individuals even if it's strictly outlawed. It's not as if the technology can be un-invented. So if folks aren't speaking out more against this, I attribute that to a feeling that it would be hopeless to bother speaking out, rather than being fine with it. Is a significant portion of Americans really indifferent to it?

Agreed about the irony in how much protest the TSA inspired and how little protest the NSA inspired. But the intrusions are quiet different, of course -- one is physically inconvenient (taking off your belt and shoes, not carrying large bottles of liquid) and is designed to be conspicuous, while the other is meant to be invisible and undetectable.

Samir Mehta | October 31, 2013
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Scott Hardie | November 10, 2013
Interesting for relevance to this discussion: The TSA is now learning from the NSA by pre-screening passengers based on harvested data, a secretive and unobtrusive way to provide security without ruffling feathers, even though people should be much more up in arms about this than they ever were about pat-downs and body scanners.