The N.S.A.’s pool of information on Americans is a pool with no fence, and pools with no fence are invitations to disaster.
The pool analogy may also explain why many Americans don’t seem very concerned with the activities of the N.S.A.
If the pool of information about American citizens is systematically abused, we aren’t going to know about it — at least not easily.
The pool of data is a pool of knowledge. Knowledge is power; and power corrupts.
Relying on the agencies themselves to report abuses is like relying on the tobacco companies to tell us whether smoking is harmful.
The collection of such data violates our autonomy and dignity.
The storage of our incidentally collected data treats us as means, not as ends. The government has begun to see its citizens not as persons, but as something to be understood and controlled.
The first reason many N.S.A. activities, including this one, are wrong is instrumental or consequential: they are potentially dangerous for the simple reason that they invite abuse that, should it occur, will be particularly difficult to uncover. To see this, reflect on the fact that the N.S.A. database is often referred to as a “pool of information.” This is an apt metaphor. In the law, swimming pools are called attractive nuisances. They attract children, and as a result, if you own a pool, even if you are a watchful, responsible parent yourself, you still have to put up a fence. Similarly, even if we can trust that the architects of the N.S.A.’s various programs had no intention of abusing the information they are collecting about American citizens, the pool of information could easily prove irresistible.
And the bigger the pool the more irresistible it is likely to become. This is not just common sense, it explains why the N.S.A.’s repeated assertions that they aren’t actually looking at the content of emails, or targeting Americans, should have been greeted with skepticism. The pool of data is a pool of knowledge. Knowledge is power; and power corrupts. As a consequence it is difficult to avoid drawing the inference that absolute knowledge might corrupt absolutely.
That, not surprisingly, is the view of Edward Snowden and others ideologically aligned with him. But a growing number of stories strongly suggest that fear of abuse is more than a mere theoretical worry. These stories are not constrained to the more obviously and widely reported cases of N.S.A. employees’ using their access to spy on sexual partners nor to similar cases in Britain where analysts collected sexually explicit photos of citizens without cause. More troubling, if less titillating, is the fact that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court itself has complained (see this ruling, footnote 14 on p. 16) that the N.S.A. has misrepresented its compliance with the court’s previous rulings that various N.S.A. techniques were unconstitutional. In other words: the FISA court is being ignored by the very agency it is alleged to oversee and monitor. It is hard not to form the impression of an agency that feels it knows better than the judiciary or the Congress. And that, surely, should be worrying.
But the most disturbing fact is really just the continued storage of a vast amount of incidentally collected content itself (again emails, photos, chat conversations and so on) — information that, as reported in The Post, is routinely searched by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. — all without a warrant, even from the ineffective FISA court, and without any real oversight. Such searches needn’t even be reported, and there is, currently, no legal oversight to prevent queries that are unrelated to national security, or even motivated by political ends. And relying on the agencies themselves to report abuses is like relying on the tobacco companies to tell us whether smoking is harmful. (A point underlined by this week’s NPR report on the fate of pre-Snowden N.S.A. whistle-blowers Bill Binney and Thomas Drake ). The N.S.A.’s pool of information on Americans is a pool with no fence, and pools with no fence are invitations to disaster — even if the owner of the pool had, in building it, the best intentions.
The pool analogy may also explain why many Americans don’t seem very concerned with the activities of the N.S.A. Putting up fences is arduous, time-consuming and expensive. And it does in fact cut down on easy access to the water. So if you want to get in that pool with the best intentions — you want to find the terrorists — it is natural to think that the fence only gets in the way of what matters. And if you trust that is what the owners of the pool are after, then worries about possible long-term negative consequences will seem abstract. After all, it is pretty clear that human beings find it difficult to think about long-term consequences — that’s true whether we are talking swimming pools, smoking or global warming. If nothing bad that we know about has happened already as a result of privacy invasions, then what’s the problem?
The problem is that in this case, if the pool of information about American citizens is systematically abused, we aren’t going to know about it — at least not easily. When it comes to global warming, at least we’ll get to know the consequences of our current policies (or lack of them) one way or another. But the abuse of knowledge isn’t going to be so obvious, and the abusers will have every reason to hide behind the good intentions I’m granting were behind the creation of the N.S.A. programs. Seen in this light, it is extremely disturbing that nothing has been done about incidental data collection. In the opinions of President Obama’s own review panel’s report, the pool should not just be fenced, it should be drained. That is, the panel urged that all incidentally collected information (again, mostly on Americans under no suspicion of any crime) simply be removed from the N.S.A.’s databases. This has not been done, and there are no signs at the moment that it will be.
The potential dangers of abusing such knowledge are one reason the storage of incidentally collected information is wrong. But there is another reason as well. The more insidious harm is not consequential but in principle. The collection of such data, as I argued last year, violates our autonomy and dignity.
This may sound surprising to some. After all, it could be reasonably argued that we are more willing to trade away our privacy than ever before, precisely for the purpose of increasing our autonomy. Our willingness — the thought goes — to trade privacy for security, is just one example of just this phenomenon, and it explains why we aren’t all that concerned about the N.S.A. We want more autonomy and they are providing it. But this logic now permeates our daily lives: we click past all the privacy policies on the web because we want the choices, the convenience — the autonomy — that only the playground of the datasphere can bring. Privacy suffers, but autonomy increases. As they say in Silicon Valley: privacy is dead. Get over it.
I think this argument gets things exactly backward. When we systematically collect private data about someone, we implicitly adopt what the philosopher Peter Strawson, in his classic essay “Freedom and Resentment,” called the “objective,” or detached, attitude toward her. We see her as something to be manipulated or controlled — even if, in fact, we never get around to the actual manipulating or controlling. Where privacy is limited in the detention camp or prison, the adoption of this attitude toward the inmate is of course explicit. It is an intrinsic feature of the enterprise. Crucially, however, it remains implicit in more subtle invasions of privacy. In some cases, this is unsurprising. When a business sells or otherwise profits from your private information — your web searches for example, or email address — it intentionally treats you as an object, an object of profit. Indeed, the nominal idea behind the privacy policies none of us ever read is to inform us of how our information will be used.
But when it comes to the N.S.A., there is no privacy policy. The storage of our incidentally collected data treats us as means, not as ends. And that is another reason such programs should worry us. A government that sees its citizens private information as subject to tracking and collection has implicitly adopted a stance toward those citizens inconsistent with the respect due to their inherent dignity as autonomous individuals. It has begun to see them not as persons, but as something to be understood and controlled. That is an attitude that is inconsistent with the demands of democracy itself.
Privacy and the Pool of Information
by Michael P. Lynch
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/privacy-and-the-pool-of-information/
The first reason many N.S.A. activities, including this one, are wrong is instrumental or consequential: they are potentially dangerous for the simple reason that they invite abuse that, should it occur, will be particularly difficult to uncover. To see this, reflect on the fact that the N.S.A. database is often referred to as a “pool of information.” This is an apt metaphor. In the law, swimming pools are called attractive nuisances. They attract children, and as a result, if you own a pool, even if you are a watchful, responsible parent yourself, you still have to put up a fence. Similarly, even if we can trust that the architects of the N.S.A.’s various programs had no intention of abusing the information they are collecting about American citizens, the pool of information could easily prove irresistible.
And the bigger the pool the more irresistible it is likely to become. This is not just common sense, it explains why the N.S.A.’s repeated assertions that they aren’t actually looking at the content of emails, or targeting Americans, should have been greeted with skepticism. The pool of data is a pool of knowledge. Knowledge is power; and power corrupts. As a consequence it is difficult to avoid drawing the inference that absolute knowledge might corrupt absolutely.
That, not surprisingly, is the view of Edward Snowden and others ideologically aligned with him. But a growing number of stories strongly suggest that fear of abuse is more than a mere theoretical worry. These stories are not constrained to the more obviously and widely reported cases of N.S.A. employees’ using their access to spy on sexual partners nor to similar cases in Britain where analysts collected sexually explicit photos of citizens without cause. More troubling, if less titillating, is the fact that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court itself has complained (see this ruling, footnote 14 on p. 16) that the N.S.A. has misrepresented its compliance with the court’s previous rulings that various N.S.A. techniques were unconstitutional. In other words: the FISA court is being ignored by the very agency it is alleged to oversee and monitor. It is hard not to form the impression of an agency that feels it knows better than the judiciary or the Congress. And that, surely, should be worrying.
But the most disturbing fact is really just the continued storage of a vast amount of incidentally collected content itself (again emails, photos, chat conversations and so on) — information that, as reported in The Post, is routinely searched by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. — all without a warrant, even from the ineffective FISA court, and without any real oversight. Such searches needn’t even be reported, and there is, currently, no legal oversight to prevent queries that are unrelated to national security, or even motivated by political ends. And relying on the agencies themselves to report abuses is like relying on the tobacco companies to tell us whether smoking is harmful. (A point underlined by this week’s NPR report on the fate of pre-Snowden N.S.A. whistle-blowers Bill Binney and Thomas Drake ). The N.S.A.’s pool of information on Americans is a pool with no fence, and pools with no fence are invitations to disaster — even if the owner of the pool had, in building it, the best intentions.
The pool analogy may also explain why many Americans don’t seem very concerned with the activities of the N.S.A. Putting up fences is arduous, time-consuming and expensive. And it does in fact cut down on easy access to the water. So if you want to get in that pool with the best intentions — you want to find the terrorists — it is natural to think that the fence only gets in the way of what matters. And if you trust that is what the owners of the pool are after, then worries about possible long-term negative consequences will seem abstract. After all, it is pretty clear that human beings find it difficult to think about long-term consequences — that’s true whether we are talking swimming pools, smoking or global warming. If nothing bad that we know about has happened already as a result of privacy invasions, then what’s the problem?
The problem is that in this case, if the pool of information about American citizens is systematically abused, we aren’t going to know about it — at least not easily. When it comes to global warming, at least we’ll get to know the consequences of our current policies (or lack of them) one way or another. But the abuse of knowledge isn’t going to be so obvious, and the abusers will have every reason to hide behind the good intentions I’m granting were behind the creation of the N.S.A. programs. Seen in this light, it is extremely disturbing that nothing has been done about incidental data collection. In the opinions of President Obama’s own review panel’s report, the pool should not just be fenced, it should be drained. That is, the panel urged that all incidentally collected information (again, mostly on Americans under no suspicion of any crime) simply be removed from the N.S.A.’s databases. This has not been done, and there are no signs at the moment that it will be.
The potential dangers of abusing such knowledge are one reason the storage of incidentally collected information is wrong. But there is another reason as well. The more insidious harm is not consequential but in principle. The collection of such data, as I argued last year, violates our autonomy and dignity.
This may sound surprising to some. After all, it could be reasonably argued that we are more willing to trade away our privacy than ever before, precisely for the purpose of increasing our autonomy. Our willingness — the thought goes — to trade privacy for security, is just one example of just this phenomenon, and it explains why we aren’t all that concerned about the N.S.A. We want more autonomy and they are providing it. But this logic now permeates our daily lives: we click past all the privacy policies on the web because we want the choices, the convenience — the autonomy — that only the playground of the datasphere can bring. Privacy suffers, but autonomy increases. As they say in Silicon Valley: privacy is dead. Get over it.
I think this argument gets things exactly backward. When we systematically collect private data about someone, we implicitly adopt what the philosopher Peter Strawson, in his classic essay “Freedom and Resentment,” called the “objective,” or detached, attitude toward her. We see her as something to be manipulated or controlled — even if, in fact, we never get around to the actual manipulating or controlling. Where privacy is limited in the detention camp or prison, the adoption of this attitude toward the inmate is of course explicit. It is an intrinsic feature of the enterprise. Crucially, however, it remains implicit in more subtle invasions of privacy. In some cases, this is unsurprising. When a business sells or otherwise profits from your private information — your web searches for example, or email address — it intentionally treats you as an object, an object of profit. Indeed, the nominal idea behind the privacy policies none of us ever read is to inform us of how our information will be used.
But when it comes to the N.S.A., there is no privacy policy. The storage of our incidentally collected data treats us as means, not as ends. And that is another reason such programs should worry us. A government that sees its citizens private information as subject to tracking and collection has implicitly adopted a stance toward those citizens inconsistent with the respect due to their inherent dignity as autonomous individuals. It has begun to see them not as persons, but as something to be understood and controlled. That is an attitude that is inconsistent with the demands of democracy itself.