6.9.13: Of Course They're Monitoring

Once again we find ourselves void of an episode of Meet The Press unable to take politicians' and reporters' statements to task, but with pleasure we'll opine on the week's biggest topic, which is the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting data on all American citizens... or all of those with either a phone or internet identification. 

First, The Guardian in the UK reported that the NSA was collecting phone data on American citizens; specifically the two interlocutors' phone numbers, their locations, and the duration of the call.  Then later in the week, the Washington Post reported that the NSA had a program entitled 'Prism' that collected data through Google, Yahoo, Facebook, et. al. on individuals overseas but that there was also mining of data from people living in the United States - in other words, us.

These stories have sent politicians, pundits, reporters, and commentators of all sorts spinning in a number of directions - everyone is all over the map.  First and foremost, President Obama spoke out in favor of the NSA program in the name of national security.  Make no mistake - the President has to answer to this for the American people, but it is not an Obama Administration scandal but this one is on Congress.  Most Senators and House Members are in favor of the program, as they should be, because they authorized such activities through the Patriot Act - remember the warrantless wiretapping.  However, this issue has seen Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and political opposite Rand Paul (R-KY) sharing the same opinion on this unprecedented privacy intrusion. 

Our question is: what did you expect?

It was only a matter of time before it went from convenient to annoying to offensive.  Follow us here.  When you lose your phone, you can go to your local Verizon store (for example) and replace the phone where they offer the 'great' service of being able to restore your contacts for you.  What a relief, right?  Well, they have all that information so those contacts were never really private.  Or you're at your computer and you visit Zappos looking for a new pair of shoes, then you visit other sites and advertisements for shoes are following you all over the place courtesy of Google's metadata tracking so you only see advertisements for the products you're interested in; quite annoying actually.  So if Google and Verizon (among others) have your information and your communication habits then are subpoenaed by the Federal Government, they will comply. There is no doubt.

Those in favor of the program say that it is in the name of national security that the NSA collects this data, but is it at the expense of individual insecurity?  Not necessarily, but there is a rapidly redefining of what privacy is that's making everyone uncomfortable, as it should.  With that said, just know, and most people do, that when you sign up to any social media-type platform, that's fair game for anyone to look at... like a blog.

However, with the collection of the phone data as outlined above, you would think to yourself that they might well just have listened to the call.  E-mails?  Same thing.  And is it is now, there are only two ways to go - you either shut the whole thing down or you live with this new reality.  Something tells us that we've already implicitly endorsed the latter.  And the reason we have is because we understand that our safety is now threatened by people using these tools to communicate, organize and plan terrorist attacks from abroad, and from here inside the United States, though all that monitoring apparatus failed in detecting the perpetrators of the bombing in Boston. Go figure.

Any comfort of privacy will now have to taken in anonymity, an overlooked amongst the millions type of thinking.   It's like walking down a really busy city street - midtown Sixth Avenue in New York City at lunch hour for example.  Even if you've never been there, just imagine walking down a street where there are so many people that you're looking at everyone but remembering no one, and the reason is because everyone's just walking down the street.   Well that's all of us when the NSA are combing through data - ninety-nine percent of us are doing the same thing so nothing stands out and we're not bothered.

But there's our existential dread... everyone doing the same thing to maintain anonymity isn't privacy, that's conformity.

Or in more practical terms, the same lawmakers who authorized all this NSA big-brother eyeballing have also created an economic state where ninety-eight percent of us are so concerned with making ends meet that we couldn't be bothered with all this Constitutionally questionable behavior and spy stuff.  Ignorance is bliss.