Surveillance, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Being Watched

The NSA thing has been growing. Aksarbent has been following it closely, and has pulled together a lot of very interesting articles -- just read the posts for the past week. This stuck out:

3. It May Not be Legal

The statute allowing such intrusions into Americans' privacy, 50 USC § 1861, requires "reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation... to ... protect against international terrorism ..."

Relevance, most would agree, is amongst the vaguest terms of legal art. Anything could be arguably relevant to a terrorism investigation. That is why discretion is generally vested in judges to make reasoned decisions. We'd be curious to know if there was any reasoning used at all when the judge approved tracking every Verizon-serviced cell phone in America.

Finally, note that the statute requires "minimization procedures" to be adopted by the Attorney General. These are supposed to detail retention and dissemination of information concerning "unconsenting United States persons" and presumably would limit the amount of time the NSA can store the data (though there is no specific time limit in the statute).

Aside from questions of government overreach, there is a fundamental issue of privacy here. Digby ran across this article from Daniel J. Solove that deals substantively with why this kind of surveillance is so reprehensible. It's hard to excerpt, so read the whole thing. This, I think, is key:

Another metaphor better captures the problems: Franz Kafka's The Trial. Kafka's novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what's in store for him. He finds out that a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him, but he's unable to learn much more. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people's information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.

The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition. Instead they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than of information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

Read Digby's comments, as well.

It's not that I am hiding anything. It's that I know how simple it is to put together disparate strands of a persons life to make it look as if they are someone they are not. And when it's people with the full force and power of the United States government who are doing it, it changes how I see such principles as the bill of rights. It becomes a mere concept, not something solid that I reflexively rely on in the way I conduct my life as an American. It's a small change that may not mean anything in itself. But as the article points out, it's the accumulation of those small changes that eventually leads to a very different society than the one we have.

Digby's another one whose posts for the past week on this are worth reading.

My summation is a lot less nuanced: it's a violation of my person and my emotional security.