I sounded real alarms about private companies spying years before Edward Snowden sounded false alarms about government spying. . Here, for example, is what I wrote in “Beware: Google Declares ‘Nothing’s Private,’” December 8, 2009.
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You’d better pray you are never prosecuted or sued for anything. Because not only Big Brother but even your civil adversary could compel Google to turn over all of the searches you made when you thought nobody was watching. And just think how embarrassing or compromising it would be to have some of those search terms come under public scrutiny – no matter how innocent your explanation.
So if you’re planning to cheat on your spouse (or to do something much worse), don’t search Google for guidance because you might as well be talking to your local gossipmonger, or to the police. And, if you think you can un-Google your most compromising searches, think again…
By the way, it’s not just Google. You’d be shocked at the spying and eavesdropping your employer, your Internet Service Provider, your local supermarket, or even your favorite (naughty) website engages in to keep track of your purchases, preferences and … peccadilloes. They blithely use that information for their own commercial purposes, but would rat you out just as blithely at the mere hint of prosecution or civil litigation.
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This is why I hope I can be forgiven my indignation at the media hysteria that attended Snowden’s NSA leaks….
Unfortunately, those leaks, which began in June 2013, led inexorably to this:
President Barack Obama signed the ‘USA Freedom Act’ Tuesday, moving the storage of bulk telephone metadata used by the National Security Agency to telecom companies rather than the government.
(NBC News, June 2, 2015)
How farcical is that? No politician has fueled and exploited this farce quite like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky: He fueled it by propagating misinformation – about the NSA listening to your calls and reading your e-mails. He exploited it by using that misinformation to scare up contributions for his presidential campaign.
I don’t agree with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on much. But here is how he decried this farce with far greater authority than I ever could:
They want you to think that there’s a government spook listening in every time you pick up the phone or Skype with your grandkids.
They want you to think of our intelligence community as the bad guys, straight out of The Bourne Identity or a Hollywood thriller, and they want you to think that if we weakened our capabilities, the rest of the world would love us more. Let me be clear: All these fears are baloney.
(National Review, May 20, 2015)
For the record, though, here is how no less a person than President Obama himself tried in vain, for years, to explain the limited scope of the NSA’s surveillance program:
Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about…
They’re not looking at names and they’re not looking at content, but sifting through this so-called meta data, they may identify potential leads with respect to people that might engage in terrorism.
(NBC News, June 7, 2013)
Given all the political wrangling about the successes or failures of this program, you can be forgiven some confusion in this regard. But this simple question should disabuse you of any confusion: With Obama & Co. touting its effectiveness versus Paul & Co. touting its fecklessness, who ya gonna trust?
That said, I cannot stress enough that the only thing this reform does is require the NSA to transfer the metadata it will continue collecting to private companies. In other words, the only thing Snowden did for the cause of privacy was provide fodder for opportunistic politicians to vent a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
But this is a good thing. Because, despite all the criticism, nobody has ever cited a single case of the NSA losing or abusing its data; whereas hardly a week goes by these days without breaking news about one private company or another losing or abusing its data.
Hence my title about this NSA reform being the privacy equivalent of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
All the same, I am concerned about this blanket scapegoating of agents at the NSA. For it could have the same chilling effect that blanket scapegoating of the police in cities like Baltimore has had. In this case, the result could be a spike in terrorist attacks, just as we’ve seen a spike in all manner of crimes in those cities.
Meanwhile, I’ve been the idiomatic skunk at a garden party of liberals when it comes to support for Obama’s NSA. But I’ve continually proffered unassailable reasons for this support in such commentaries as “Ignorance Prevails re NSA Spying and Snowden Leaking,” June 14, 2014, and “I Spy, You Spy, We All Spy,” July 2, 2013.
More to the point, here is how I put the NSA reform Obama just signed off on into perspective in “Facebook Complaining about NSA Spying? Ha!” March 15, 2014:
You are probably aware that President Obama appointed a commission to recommend cosmetic changes to the NSA programs. But he only did so to avoid having to point out how stupid the American people are for buying into Snowden’s self-righteous and misguided outrage. After all, the NSA collects metadata for the sole purpose of trying to keep them safe.
By contrast, these outraged nincompoops are showing nary a concern about tech companies tracking every move they make online for the sole purpose of trying to sell them stuff. Which makes the open letter Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and AOL sent to Obama last week complaining about NSA surveillance a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Frankly, when it comes to bulk collection of private data, these companies make the NSA look like a Luddite.
To be fair, though, Apple CEO Tim Cook has always made a point of distinguishing his company in this context. He seized the opportunity enactment of this NSA reform presented to do so again:
I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information.
They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong.
(Daily Mail, June 3, 2015)
Finally, during his fulminations on the Senate floor on Sunday, Sen. Paul declared that those denouncing his scaremongering about the NSA secretly want terrorists to attack the United States so they could blame him.
Of course I harbor no such want. But I fear it will take another 9/11 for politicians to have the balls to tell the American people the truth – not only about the NSA, but about Snowden too.
As it happens, I’ve written as much about the latter as I have the former – in such commentaries as “Snowden and Greenwald Profiting Off NSA Leaks…” May 20, 2014. Here, for example, is an excerpt from “Judge Ruling on NSA Spying…,” December 18, 2013, in which I put my take on Snowden into perspective.
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I too would be championing Snowden’s professed cause if he had taken his treasure trove of NSA secrets to a reputable newspaper, like the New York Times or Washington Post, instead of entrusting it to a news hustler like the then-obscure lawyer/journalist/blogger Greenwald.
Recall that Snowden initially claimed his only mission was to inform the American people about the NSA’s surveillance activities. Well, with apologies to George W. Bush, he had just cause to declare, ‘Mission Accomplished,’ six months ago.
Moreover, rather than fleeing like a fugitive, Snowden could have become a confidential informant (like a latter-day Deep Throat), continued on with his seemingly idyllic life in Hawaii, and left it to his newspaper of choice to expose all of the secrets that are fit to print … in a manner that does not compromise national security.
Instead, this narcissistic, self-righteous, naive and self-appointed arbiter — not only of what metadata the government can collect, but also of what documents it can classify as top secret — conspired with Greenwald to make his face every bit as famous as his leaks. In the process he wittingly (or unwittingly) handed the ‘NSA’s crown jewels’ over to America’s two most-formidable adversaries, China and Russia, on a silver platter. No Chinese or Russian spy could ever have achieved such a feat – even in his wildest dream.
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In any event, this highfalutin USA Freedom Act should spare us any more political grandstanding about the NSA. If only it would also spare us any more misguided chatter about Snowden as a champion of privacy rights. As Cook and I have labored to demonstrate, Snowden targeting the NSA to protect us from privacy violations is rather like the United States targeting hackers to protect us from terrorist attacks.
Alas, the truth embedded in this analogy is that Snowden’s leaks have not only disrupted cooperation among nations in the fight against terrorism, but also made it far more difficult for law enforcement officials to disrupt terrorist plots. Therefore, if/when terrorists attack the United States, the person to blame would not be the grandstanding Paul, but the fugitive Snowden.
Related commentaries:
Google…
NSA spying…
I spy…
Judge ruling…