The Scene staff
What’s your privacy worth?
On June 6, what might normally have been a national U.S. debate became a worldwide uproar when the British newspaper The Guardian published a story alleging gross privacy invasion by the United States government.
Former government contractor Edward Snowden allegedly provided the paper with Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) documents that showed national communications-service providers, such as Verizon, had been forced to hand over millions of phone records for U.S. customers. Snowden had obtained the documents, he told news sources, while working on national-security projects.
In the days after the story broke, Americans learned that not only phone records but also emails were subject to surveillance and analysis by federal agents.
With the unexpected scrutiny of its national-security practices, the National Security Administration and other U.S. officials have defended their actions, saying the information has helped thwart terrorist plots and provided a higher degree of safety and security for U.S. citizens.
Perhaps just as alarming as the vast damage to the American public’s Fourth Amendment rights is that same public’s apathy on the issue.
In 2001, Congress enacted the Patriot Act in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. At the time, Americans questioned the need for the law, which allowed law-enforcement and national-security agencies greater power to detain citizens and delve into their private lives — even into such trivial aspects as library rental records.
Last month, Americans learned that widespread inspection of phone and electronic-communication records wasn’t only suspected by paranoid conspiracy theorists, but in all likelihood was a common occurrence. However, that news has been met with a resounding “Meh” by millions of people in younger generations.
Could the cause of such apathy be the feeling that we’ve already given up a huge amount of privacy? Many social-media users have hundreds or even thousands of photos of themselves posted on Facebook or Twitter. Some share nearly every aspect of their lives, from the places they go to the food they eat and even their emotions and thoughts.
Complete strangers might know a social-media user better than his or her own family, especially if that kin isn’t attuned to Facebook.
Granted, use of social media is a voluntary surrender of privacy. A person chooses how much he or she shares with friends or the world — an option that wasn’t given by the National Security Administration to phone and email users.
The U.S. government has attempted to justify its actions with claims of thwarted terrorist attacks. If the populace accepts this reasoning, what else are they prepared to accept in the name of safety? Active wiretaps on innocent citizens? Government video monitoring in private places?
If we want to continue to live in a nation where our basic freedoms — those of speech, religion and privacy, to name a scant few— are guaranteed, we need to accept that they come at a cost. In this new age, it may be that the National Security Administration needs to find new means of detection that don’t involve monitoring U.S. citizens.
In the meantime, we may be a little more at risk as a country. But parents don’t ask children to give up the freedom of riding a bike without training wheels or driving a car at 16 for fear of a scabbed knee or fender bender. The same analogy could apply to our right to live privately, but on a much larger scale.