I've been asked to write about PRISM, the recently rumored government surveillance program. Details are scarce, especially once the hype has been filtered out. I don't know much about PRISM or Snowden in particular, so I'll discuss the topic generally.
One of the principal benefits of a government is that a government provides peace and security for its citizens. A government provides peace by preventing people from causing harm. In modern governments, this is usually done by establishing punishments for bad behavior; for example, imprisonment for theft and fines for minor infractions.
A government must have more power than any of its individual citizens in order to effectively enforce its own laws. After all, laws can only be enforced against people who are willing to break them. As such, the government must have the power to coerce people in order to punish them.
Many modern governments also recognize that it is beneficial to limit the power of the government. This is the motivation behind the checks and balances in the Constitution of the United States of America: each branch of the government can prevent the other branches from overreaching its bounds. There are also specific limitations placed on what the government can do to individuals. These limitations, such as due process, are designed to prevent governments from oppressing individuals, as many governments have done throughout history.
We have seen significant changes in the government of the United States since their inception. There are many more laws and the laws are much more complex. And the ways that information is generated, stored, and obtained are completely different.
These days, we're increasingly aware of people who are unaffected by our legal deterrents; for example, terrorists who aren't bothered by the prospect of dying aren't discouraged by the fact that officers of the law who figure out what they're up to will probably shoot them. It may be that there are more of these people; it's certain that we hear more about them. And technology marches on, ever enabling offense far more than it does defense.
The result is that we have a government that gets increasing demands from its citizens to protect them against some really scary people. In order to be more effective, it does what organizations naturally do: it expands its power.
Unfortunately, the emphasis on pre-emptive law enforcement requires secrecy, as people can change or cancel their plans if they know that they've been found out. And secrecy prevents anyone from watching the watchers.
One of the most frightening implications of our current political and legal climate is that it is impractical for any individual to know whether he or she is breaking some law. What's more, citizens have no idea whether or not their governments are investigating their actions. In a society where people regularly break laws, possibly because there is no course of action that is not against some law, and in which the laws are not all enforced, it is possible for individuals and groups to be targeted by government officials – and that targeting has the appearance of being the rule of law.
Government has always sounded a bit paradoxical; it protects liberties by restricting them. A government designed to promote freedom is necessarily a balancing act. Absolute freedom means that no laws are enforced and people are allowed to kill as they please. Absolute security means that no one has any freedom or privacy.
Unfortunately, there is increasing evidence to suggest that our government is encroaching more and more on its citizens' liberties and privacy. To make matters worse, many experts believe that the denial of these liberties does not provide additional security but merely the appearance of security.
I'm reminded of an occasion when a friend of mine called another friend. She had a virus on her computer and she called a computer expert. After some time talking about it, he offered to visit her apartment in the following couple of days to clean up her computer. She explained that she'd talked about it and felt better and that he needn't bother.
If what we're after is feeling better about it, we're doing fine. But if we actually want to solve these problems, we're going to have to look them square in the eye.
It seems clear that we can't prevent all terrorism. So we must decide what we will and will not do in our attempt to increase our security. At what point have we ceded enough liberties that the lives we save aren't worth living? What risks are we willing to take in order to live free? This debate is certain to be sticky, as these decisions must be made in aggregate and not everyone will see eye to eye.
There's plenty of room for dissent, but my opinion is that we ought to be expanding, not limiting our freedoms. We ought to expand the legal notion of search and seizure to include data, even if those data are stored in servers outside of an individual's direct control. We ought to ensure that people know when a subpoena has been served to collect their data. We ought to actually stick to our current legal doctrines, like habeas corpus. We ought to take our chances that someone will get past ordinary law enforcement and be willing to stand up ourselves to protect others.
One last change we ought to make for our security is that we ought to become the kind of nation that no one wants to attack. This is not a governmental change. It is a cultural change. Most of the important needs we have today are not needs that can be met by any government. They must be met by ordinary people, one at a time.
Am I scared by news like the PRISM story? Absolutely. I think I'm scared most of all that we have politicians and ordinary citizens that have not only allowed this sort of thing to happen, but have made it inevitable.
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