As tech expands, privacy shrinks

U.S. snooping raises questions

NEW YORK — For more than a decade now, Americans have lived with the uneasy knowledge that someone might be watching.

Now, paranoia has come face to face with modern reality: The technology of our age has opened the door to a massive domestic surveillance program by the National Security Agency. Torn between our desires for privacy and protection, we’re now forced to decide what we really want.

“We are living in an age of surveillance,” said Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University’s School of Law in St. Louis who studies privacy law and civil liberties. “There’s much more watching and much more monitoring, and I think we have a series of important choices to make as a society

— about how much watching we want.”

The NSA, officials acknowledged last week, has been collecting phone records of hundreds of millions of U. S. phone customers. In another program, it collects audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of the nine major Internet providers, including Microsoft, Google, Apple and Yahoo.

The clash between security and privacy is far from new. In 1878, it played out in a court battle over whether government officials could open letters sent through the mail. In 1967, lines were drawn over government wiretapping.

Government used surveillance to ferret out Communists during the 1950s and to spy on civil rights leaders during the 1960s.

But in earlier times, courts, lawmakers and the public eventually demanded curbs on such watching. Those efforts didn’t stop improper government monitoring, but they restrained it, said Christian Parenti, author of “The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror.”

The difference now, he and other experts say, is that enormous advances in personal technology and the public’s broad tolerance of monitoring because of shifting attitudes about terrorism and online privacy have given govern- ment and private companies significantly more power — and leeway — to monitor individual behavior.

“We’ve allowed surveillance of all kinds to be normalized, domesti- cated, such that we frequently fail to tell the difference between harmful and helpful surveillance,” said David Lyon, director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.