pumpkinstrokemarrow

This time from the NYRB of 22 December in which David Cole gives us two and a half pages about the growing dependence of government upon invasion of privacy, particular that which avoids the use of smelly snoopers on the ground by the use of various forms of hi-tech and lo-cost snooping.

The US being a place with a constitution, a lot of the legal argument seems to revolve around something called the fourth amendment, written maybe 250 years ago with rather different threats in mind, both as to methods & motive and, in part, part of the response to what was seen as tyrannical enforcement of law from the mother country. Which all strikes me as rather artificial; one should not need to be making policy by dancing on the pin heads of words from another world.

Some of the moral argument revolves around what sort of privacy might we reasonably inspect. Does the state have the right to read all my emails and listen to all my phone calls? Does the state have a right to build up a picture of my life from the various records of credit card companies, banks, CCTV cameras, supermarkets and the like? As the article points out, such a picture could quite feasibly be quite comprehensive these days. Can I sensibly deny the state that right when I happily divulge all sorts of stuff about myself on Facebook or on some TV reality show? Should there be rules about the ways in which the Google Corporation or British Telecom are allowed to read the emails they process on our behalf?

Some people go for the nothing to hide argument. If I have nothing to hide, why would I care if some bored operative up north is trawling through my emails? Or if some computer is flagging up every email containing the word 'bomb' or the word 'monosodiumglutamate'? Provided the people doing the trawling are not the same people that I come across in the course of my daily affairs, I couldn't care less. I think I am fairly relaxed about this, although I recognise that different people might have rather different ideas about what privacy they want. I might regard my toe clipping activities as deeply private while someone else might be more concerned about the privacy of their religious beliefs. Or the detail of their night life.

And then, from the point of view of the government, particularly those on the front line of the wars on drugs and terror (wars which seem to be the main drivers for all this surveillance and leaving aside one's views on those wars), people in the round are far more tolerant of discrete, electronic surveillance than they are of overt surveillance involving human agents.

On the whole I think I go along with discrete surveillance. The worry is one of trust: does one trust the government of the day not to abuse the information it collects in this way? Some of the worriers point to the bad record of 20th century dictatorships in this regard. The NYRB only points to the case of a Oregon lawyer who happened to be a Muslim and who got unpleasantly caught up in a trawl for terrorists as a result of a mistake over a fingerprint. I do not find either argument very convincing and I would settle for proper surveillance of the surveillance. As I have suggested in other contexts, the former should be public and open while the latter can be discrete and secret.  One of the public considerations would be proportionality: the style and volume of the surveillance should be proportionate to the importance of the offence being trawled for.

So to echo the end of my last post, perhaps you had better join the debate! Write to your MP!