In fight against the surveillance state, past is prologue

The Cato Institute hosted its Second Annual Surveillance Conference this week. The symposium — which was live-streamed on the Internet and available on the Cato Institute’s website for later viewing — promises a gathering of “top scholars, litigators, intelligence officials, activists and technologists working at the intersection of privacy, technology and national security.”

I think that the first academic symposium on the legal and policy implications of surveillance technology was held more than 40 years ago at Columbia University and published in 1972 by Columbia’s Human Rights Law Review (HRLR). I was asked to write the foreword to the collection of articles from the symposium, published in book form as “Surveillance, Dataveillance and Personal Freedoms: Use and Abuse of Information Technology” (R.E. Burdick, 1973).

Ironically, you can’t read this book on the Internet.

“Never before in the history of this country has ... secret surveillance been so pervasive,” I wrote in the foreword. “All the more dangerous to the personal freedoms of every citizen is that this degree of surveillance has been made much more omnivorous because of the swift advance in the technology of surveillance.”

What I wrote 40 years ago is, unfortunately, as true today as it was in 1973.

The articles in this book predate the investigations in the 1970s by the Rockefeller Com- mission, and the congressional Pike and Church Committees, all of which revealed longstanding surveillance abuses by the U.S. intelligence community. The HRLR symposium articles, and the subsequent findings of these congressional investigations, were prescient warnings of what Americans should have been expecting in the future from a surveillance state left unchecked by a lack of firm oversight and strict accountability

Sen. Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat who later served as the chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, contributed a long article on “The First Amendment: A Living Thought in the Computer Age.”

An article by HRLR staff members on “Police Use of Remote Camera Systems for Surveillance of Public Streets” examined the policy and con- stitutional implications of an experimental, federally funded program in the small town of Mt. Vernon, New York.

HRLR editor Donald R. Davis’ article on “Police Surveillance of Political Dissidents” coined the term “dataveillance,” and anticipated the type of NSA mass surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013: “The ... manipulation and management of vast quantities of disparate bits of ... presently stored information ... for the purpose of retrieving, collating or evaluating those bits of information relevant to the subject of the record check.”

The persistent deployment by the U.S. government of increasingly effective surveillance technology has been a constant in American society for nearly a century. This constant is what Sen. Ervin described in his HRLR article as “the insatiable curiosity of government to know everything about those it governs” and “the ingenuity applied by government officials to find out what they think they must know to achieve their ends.”

Which is why it is important for activists to not only focus on current threats to civil liberties, posed by existing surveillance technologies, but to also understand the historical context of those threats while continuing to anticipate the next technological incarnation of the same threats far into the future.