Living in a Surveillance World
The NSA scandal is much bigger than the government having access to our communications. This is really more about how our way of life and civil liberties are being invaded and have evolved over the last 60 years. I remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 when I was in high school, thinking to myself if it was ever possible for a government to spy on its own citizens, and how much surveillance they are really doing. Surveillance is not a new thing, of course. The reality here is that governments have been spying on citizens for a long time.
Orwell’s classic was published at the advent of the Cold War and the intelligence age, when both the Soviets and Americans were not only spying on each other, but also on its own citizenry. Whether the KGB was monitoring participants of the Hungarian Uprising or Joesph McCarthy was going after anyone with rumored Communist sympathies, the thought police rose to fame during this period. J. Edgar Hoover took spying to a whole new level when he personally monitored people he didn’t like, such as Emma Goldman, Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Black Panthers.
After the Cold War, government surveillance concerns didn’t spring up again until the September 11 attacks, when President Bush instituted the Patriot Act to gather intelligence from within the United States. In 2011 President Obama signed in a four-year extension, which includes roving wiretapping and monitoring “lone wolf” terrorists.
So the NSA row doesn’t come as a surprise to me, but I can understand why it might surprise the rest of America. Prior to this, it was just understood that government surveillance was only being done on so-called “bad people” trying to subvert the country. The NSA maintains that they are only monitoring terrorists and have allegedly thwarted “dozens of terrorist plots.” But for some reason, they overlooked the terror plot by lone wolves Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But, hey, what do I know?
Red flags went up for me back last October when Janet Napolitano gave a talk on Homeland Security’s role in protecting the nation from cyber attacks. When asked about her own habits in protecting her online presence, she simply stated that she didn’t use email. She claims it’s for “a whole host of reasons.” But I guess we all know why now.
I use social media a lot, so I understand that what you put out in public is public. But the email and phone hacking of ordinary citizens gives us all an extra dose of uneasiness since these communication tools are suppose to be more private. Even the hacking of Blackberrys – apparently the most secure mobiles on the market – during the 2009 G20 summit in London is unnerving. If anything, the emergence of personal technology has only made it easier for the government to monitor anyone.
Regarding Ed Snowden, is he a hero or a traitor? It is still too soon to call, but the U.S. media smear campaign is just as unnerving. If you only follow the American press, you would think Snowden was a narcissistic, high school dropout/spy for the Chinese with an overly paid government contract job. It’s funny how quick the media forgot that Obama’s administration was monitoring them too.
Will the recent disclosure change America’s personal online and phone habits? Probably not – for now. Will Obama stop doing this kind of surveillance? Probably not – for now. Maybe for now we can begin to have the discussion about the future of surveillance and protection of civil liberties for everyone.
In the meantime, while Obama believes the War on Terror is over, does this mean this is the beginning of the War on Surveillance?