A rational, pragmatic look at NSA surveillance, Part III

While the national debate continues over the NSA’s storage of the nation’s phone records – innocent and guilty – Bill Keller of The New York Times takes a look at the good and the bad in privacy matters beyond the spy agency’s clandestine activities.

On the one hand, New York City, taking a cue from London, is installing 3,000 closed-circuit TV cameras (and license-plate scanners and radiation detectors) around the city that allows police to cross-reference databases of stolen cars, wanted criminals and suspected terrorists.

Perhaps more disturbing is the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that DNA samples of non-suspects – even those acquired from crime victims – can be stored and cross-checked for prior criminal activity.

And, of course, we have ongoing worries about tiny drone aircraft being flown for a wide variety of uses that could involve invasions of privacy.

On the other hand, we are witnessing a strange dichotomy, with Americans perfectly willing to give up private information in their everyday travels and purchases, yet expressing fright and distrust when their phone number is thrown into a stack with more than a billion other pieces of information. Sure, the NSA and FBI have new capabilities. But a trip to a hospital, conducting a Google search, buying an item on Amazon – these are all a baring experience in the digital age.

Keller, the former Times executive editor, wrote on his NYT blog that Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, laid out the new realities:

“The information vacuumed up by the NSA was already available to faceless bureaucrats in phone and Internet companies -- not government employees but strangers just the same. “Many people write as though we make some great sacrifice by disclosing private information to others, but it is in fact simply the way that we obtain services we want -- whether the market services of doctors, insurance companies, Internet service providers, employers, therapists and the rest or the nonmarket services of the government like welfare and security.”

Keller picks up the story from there:

“Privacy advocates will retort that we surrender this information wittingly, but in reality most of us just let it slip away. We don’t pay much attention to privacy settings or the ‘terms of service’ fine print. Our two most common passwordsare ‘password’ and ‘123456.’

“From time to time we get worrisome evidence of data malfeasance, such as the last big revelation of NSA eavesdropping, in 2005, which disclosed that the agency was tapping Americans without the legal nicety of a warrant, or the more recent IRS targeting of right-wing political groups. But in most cases the advantages of intrusive technology are tangible and the abuses are largely potential. Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA data-mining have, so far, not included evidence of any specific abuse.

“The danger, it seems to me, is not surveillance per se. We have already decided, most of us, that life on the grid entails a certain amount of intrusion. Nor is the danger secrecy, which, as Posner notes, ‘is ubiquitous in a range of uncontroversial settings,’ a promise the government makes to protect ‘taxpayers, inventors, whistle-blowers, informers, hospital patients, foreign diplomats, entrepreneurs, contractors, data suppliers and many others.’”