Revealing the government’s surveillance secrets

What happened

The Obama administration was embroiled in a fierce debate over America’s burgeoning surveillance state this week, after a former government contractor revealed that the National Security Agency was collecting vast troves of data on virtually all phone calls and had access to Facebook, Google searches and emails, and other Internet data. The British newspaper The Guardian sparked the debate by publishing leaked documents in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered Verizon to give the NSA “daily, ongoing” records of all domestic and foreign calls. Other phone companies receive similar ongoing demands for data. The Washington Post then revealed that nine leading U.S. technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Facebook, had been supplying the NSA with the emails, online chats, videos, and search queries of specific foreign users, on request. In this Internet surveillance program, known as PRISM, the companies reportedly set up secure “mailboxes” into which they could deposit specific user information requested by the NSA.

The source of the Guardian leaks, Edward Snowden, said he quit his job at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where he administered computer networks for the NSA, because he was shocked at how “massive and invasive” the government’s intelligence-gathering system had become. Snowden, 29, was reported to be hiding in a safe house in Hong Kong, hoping to escape extradition and prosecution. Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who published Snowden’s original disclosures, said there were “a lot more significant revelations” to come.

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President Obama sought to reassure those alarmed by the revelations, saying that nobody should conclude the government “is listening to your telephone calls.” But he argued that “modest encroachments on privacy” were “worth us doing” to protect the country from terrorism. Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, told a Senate committee that the surveillance programs had played a role in stopping “dozens” of terrorist plots.

What the editorials said

The Obama administration has “lost all credibility” when it comes to matters of security and privacy, said The New York Times. “The issue is not whether the government should vigorously pursue terrorists.” The issue is whether that justifies building “extensive, secret digital dossiers on such a mass scale,” including the phone records of every American. Some future president or rogue government official could abuse the awesome power the government now has acquired to snoop on anyone and everyone.

Calm down, said The Wall Street Journal. The NSA isn’t bugging your phone. Instead it’s collecting “metadata”—logs of calls received and sent, the locations of callers, and lengths of conversations—which can then be scoured by algorithms for trends and patterns that might indicate potential terrorist threats. The alternative to such automated sweeps is a more pervasive use of low-tech methods like wiretaps, tails, and physical searches—“invasions of persons rather than statistical probabilities.” It’s important to remember that these surveillance programs were authorized by law, said The Washington Post, and that they undergo regular scrutiny by the surveillance court and congressional intelligence committees. There’s no evidence that the government’s authority was “abused or that the privacy of any American was illegally or improperly invaded.”

What the columnists said

The potential for abuse in metadata analysis is truly chilling, said Jane Mayer in NewYorker.com. Track the calls of an individual woman, and you might see calls to a gynecologist, then to an oncologist, and then to close family members. Look at the GPS-enabled location of smartphones at night, and you’ll discover “who is romantically involved with whom.” Track the phones of political opposition leaders and journalists, meanwhile, and you can see where they gather, and with whom. Even if the data is only being used to find suspected terrorists, “the system is ripe for mission creep,” said Josh Dzieza in TheDailyBeast.com. “All it takes is one aspiring J. Edgar Hoover to start blackmailing political foes, intimidating activists, or tracking down whistle-blowers.”

The overreaction to these revelations is absurd, said David Simon in NYTimes.com. While it may sound “scary” for the government to be analyzing billions of phone records and suspected terrorists’ emails and Internet activity, it’s not fundamentally different from wiretapping or other surveillance methods used for decades. If another 9/11 occurred tomorrow, imagine what critics would say if intelligence and elected officials did not take advantage of available metadata “to find those needles in the haystacks.”

It’s our exaggerated fear of terrorism that’s led us to cede so much power to “secret police,” said Conor Friedersdorf in TheAtlantic.com. On 9/11, about 3,000 people died. By way of context, consider that in the same year, 13,290 Americans died in drunk driving accidents, and nearly 30,000 were killed with guns. Every year, about 3,000 Americans die of food poisoning. All these threats kill more people than terrorism, but would Americans “welcome a surveillance state” to reduce them? Congress regularly votes down less invasive policies because “they offend our notions of liberty.” Even if you trust the government’s good intentions, said Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg.com, consider this: The NSA gave Snowden, “a disaffected, self-aggrandizing 29-year-old libertarian,” access to some of its most highly classified programs. If the government “can’t protect its own secrets, what makes it competent to protect ours?”

We’re finally having a real debate over the balance between national security and personal privacy, said Scott Shane in The New York Times, but don’t expect anything to change. “Congressional leaders of both parties have so far expressed support” for the surveillance programs; Democrats will not undermine Obama, while Republicans have consistently supported anti-terrorism programs. The public, meanwhile, “continues to show a high tolerance for what the government claims is necessary to prevent terrorism,” with polls showing a majority of Americans willing to trade some privacy for security. The era of Big Data, it appears, is here to stay.