Maintaining privacy in the Internet age
Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks reminds us our web-browsing data is not confidential
DANIEL BAIRD I think of myself as having a modest online imprint.
When I get up in the morning, I check my email and Facebook accounts and inspect a variety of news sites, and I do this with regularity throughout the day. I exchange frequent texts, emails and calls with my beautiful love Melissa and with my 13-year-old daughter. When I update my status on Facebook, it is typically to document my life with Melissa, upload images of my daughter at summer camp or post a recently published article. When I am bored or in need of distraction, I might idly surf the Internet, clicking through site after site and occasionally finding myself in unexpected and sketchy places.
I rarely if ever worry about issues of privacy; I assume for the most part that I am protected from manipulation and abuse. One of the revelations of 2013 was that I was naive to think I could casually participate in something as expansive, unregulated, centreless and, even with passwords and readily available encryption technologies, irreducibly public as the Internet. It has finally become clear that the Internet is the new, and perhaps only, public sphere; many of us have been operating on archaic assumptions — at our peril.
Given the scale, weight and continuing global impact of his disclosures, it is hard to believe that it was only six months ago that Edward Snowden took leave from his lucrative job as an analyst for Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor for the National Security Agency in the United States, abandoned both his home and his girlfriend in the paradise of Waipahu, Hawaii, and boarded a plane for Hong Kong. It was while he was in Hong Kong that the first of his classified revelations became public.
By some reports, Snowden is in possession of from 200,000 to one million highly classified documents copied from the servers of the NSA, and the disclosures, which have appeared regularly in publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, have largely concerned the NSA’s mass surveillance programs in the United States and abroad. Snowden’s revelations have at the very least given rise to a significant public debate on the balance between privacy and security.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, the NSA has been empowered to undertake a mass surveillance program whose ultimate aim is to thwart terrorist attacks of the kind that took place on Sept. 11. The precise nature of Snowden’s disclosures is complicated, and their legal and policy implications largely pertain to the United States, but the gist of the matter is that the NSA, with the often willing help of companies like IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, has been scooping up data from phone and Internet communications of a broad swath of people in the United States and abroad in a way that is almost entirely indiscriminate. There is little doubt in my mind that emails I have sent and phone calls I have made to colleagues and friends are somewhere in the vortex of the NSA’s servers.
While the NSA has periodically violated U.S. law on such matters, so far as anyone knows it has not as of yet misused the information on innocent citizens of the United States or elsewhere in what can only be described as a mass and shameless invasion of privacy. The question at this point should be whether those whose lives are remote from terrorist activities should really care whether the government monitors our electronic communications, especially if such surveillance marginally increases our personal security.
Why should we care about whether our phone and online activities are private and protected from the eyes of the government, so long as com- promising personal information is not released to the public? We already entrust the government with lots of personal information. Though I do not live an especially racy life, I would prefer that my emails and phone calls of the past12 years not be public, but doing so would have at most a minor impact on my life and none on my personal freedom. Why should I care? What is at stake? And why did any of us think that our lives and mercurial obsessions could be played out on the Internet with impunity and in complete privacy? The Internet, after all, does not resemble a bedroom. Sending an email is more like shouting in a public square than like whispering in someone’s ear. Images of George Orwell’s Big Brother from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a not-so-subtle critique of totalitarianism, are often invoked in this context, yet totalitarian re- gimes typically come into existence through violence and not surveillance (surveillance comes later as a way of maintaining an illegitimate regime), and there is little reason to think that curtailing the activities of organizations like the NSA will prevent the emergence of totalitarian regimes in the future; the problems with our not-so-transparent democracies, governed as they are by money and influence and short-term interests, run far deeper. In addition, we already accept, and even expect, a remarkable amount of online surveillance in an effort to offer us products tailored to our personal needs and fantasies, and if we don’t object to that, then our overall commitment to privacy is weak at best. And, finally, we have come to expect governments and other institutions, like hospitals, fire departments, the police, even banks, to protect us and our lifestyles at a level that may ultimately be unrealistic, even with mass surveillance. What if a prime minister ran on the platform that he or she could protect our privacy but by doing so we have to accept the possibility that 3,000 people will occasionally die in a terrorist attack and the economy plunge to depression levels? Would he or she ever be elected? Would we embrace even modest levels of risk in order to protect the broad privacy of our online activities?
Many of us in North America live our lives overinflating our personal significance and taking for granted the protections offered by stable democratic governments and thriving economies: we think of these things as rights and entitlements rather than the product of good, and highly contingent, historical fortune. But in a highly globalized world challenged by climate change and the very real threat of terrorism in myriad forms, it is by no means clear that we can have our cake and eat it too. We may have to choose between the secure and remarkably narcissistic lifestyle of 21st-century consumer capitalism and unconditional freedom and privacy.
The big question Edward Snowden’s disclosures have raised this year is in a way the same one that climate change has raised for close to adecade: are the lives we live sustainable in the world we actually live in and the future we hope for? Can we have complete privacy and complete security at the same time? Can we continue to avoid changing the way we live our lives?
We probably cannot give up our addiction to fossil fuels and live in the brightly lit, everything-available 24/7 cities of the 21st century. Similarly, we may have to pull back and conduct our private lives in private in order to ensure, well, privacy.
I think I will resist the temptation to text Melissa now and just walk over to her place and talk to her in person. There will be no data of any kind for governments and corporations to scoop up.