You all remember the whole warrantless wiretapping thing that came out a few years ago? Essentially, the NSA was wiretapping US citizens without a warrant, as a form of counter-terrorism. Yes, people got up in arms about it at the time, no one was held accountable, a FISA bill was passed to grant immunity to anyone accountable, and the country moved on, in the name of “National Security”. So we’re done with it, right?
Not quite. It has recently come out that the NSA (National Security Agency) was not only wiretapping those people that were considered terrorists either internally or outside of US borders (the NSAs claim for a while was that they were only wiretapping externally). No, according the The Register, the NSA was actively watching journalists and news organizations. What’s the difference between this and what they were known to have been doing before? Well, first, it has been thought that the warrantless wiretapping was automated, flagging people automatically using algorithms. Actively watching journalists and news organizations means going beyond using generic computer algorithms, and assigning human work hours to this task.
Why is this a bigger deal than warrantless wiretapping? For starters, it means the project was significantly further reacher than previously thought, which leads us to the question “Who else were they watching?”. Just because we only know of two instances (warrantless wiretapping, and watching journalists/news organizations) doesn’t mean there aren’t others out there. Universities maybe? What about ISPs or other tech companies? All easy targets with large amounts of data on their users.
Second, there’s the whole “First Amendment” thing, wherein “the Press” is granted the ability to report on anything, without fear of repercussion. Now, maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but if there’s a government agency watching journalists and news organizations, without said journalists and/or news organizations knowing, doesn’t that open a lot of doors for censorship/surveillance without any accountability?
How far does the word “journalist” extend? According to the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) bloggers’ rights page,
if you engage in journalism, you’re a journalist.
This means that bloggers very easily fall under the NSA program of spying on journalists. This means that high school newspapers across the country could have been targeted.
Where does this leave us, as citizens? Does it mean we need to constantly live in fear of our govenrnment, since we don’t have any way of knowing if they are watching what we say on the internet? Hopefully not.
What it does mean is that we need to modify the way our government thinks about our rights as citizens, and how these rights extend into the digital age. A while ago, Phi said
This could also open up a wonderful public discussion of security in general, which impacts everything from Facebook to ATM PINs to electronic voting machines, things that are woven deep into the fabric of our social, economic, and political lives.
in reference to Obama’s wanting to use his blackberry/email as a way to communicate. If we raise awareness among the populace, and among law-makers, as to what we want, we really could change the way security/privacy is looked at.
I’m scared. I don’t trust our government, particularly not the more clandestine organizations. The legal battles over digital privacy are still being fought, and so it falls upon us as citizens to take our digital privacy into our own hands until such time as the legal status of digital privacy has been vetted.
We have the techonology with which to secure our email interactions, and we have the technology with which to secure any internet activity at all. The issue with using either of these technologies is that nobody else uses them.
I can encrypt my email, but if the person on the other end can’t un-encrypt it, that’s useless. I can use services like Tor, but if only the techno-nerds are the ones using it, it doesn’t help anyone else, and the proliferation doesn’t spread.
I’m not normally one to get roused over the idea of constitutional rights, because generally speaking, I don’t feel, personally, my rights being infringed upon. It’s absolutely selfish, but it’s how I get through my day. However, this issue is bigger than me. As we move more and more of our lives online, “into the cloud”, we expose ourselves more and more. Not only to our friends (arguably one of the benefits of doing so), but to anyone with the know-how to access it, and the technology/political power to allow them to do so. What’s the cost? I could entirely remove myself from the internet, but then I lose out on the wonder of technology (and I’d have to switch majors). I could continue doing what I’m doing, but that exposes a lot about me to almost anyone.
Instead, I advocate pushing back. Take security into our own hands, force the issue for the government, the companies who’s products we use, the email services we use, and even our employers/universities to provide the infrastructure we want. The infrastructure we arguably need.
Now that I’ve flagged myself in an NSA database somewhere, I’m going to go hole myself up somewhere until they come for me.
Tags: computer security, EFF, politics, privacy, technology
