by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up watching a TV program, an episode of the
long-running PBS documentary series Frontline called “The United States of Secrets,” actually the second part of a
two-part program under that title. The first part had aired last week, it had
been two hours long and I had recorded it (fortunately on the same blank DVD on
which I recorded the new one!); this one was a follow-up called “Privacy Lost”
and it covered Edward Snowden and his leaks, as well as one of the knottier and
least discussed aspects of the whole issue: the role of Internet companies in
general and Google and AT&T in particular facilitating and enabling the
government’s spying on everybody. The show features Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman and also manages to include
the point of view of the NSA and other people with the national security
establishment (though for some reason the entries for it on PBS’s Web site
include below-the-line credits but not a list of on-camera interviewees, and imdb.com has posted a partial
list for the interviewees in part one but not part two), and the portrait is basically a chilling
one of the government and private industry in collusion. It was Google
co-founder Sergey Brin who said as early as 1995, “Privacy is over — get used
to it,” and their business model (copied by other Internet companies in general
and Facebook in particular) has been to monetize their sites by collecting as
much information as possible on all their users and sell that to advertisers.
This means that these companies are collecting, 24/7, immense amounts of data on
their users — and according to the U.S. Supreme Court, once you have
“voluntarily” given your data to a phone company, a Web site or an ISP, you
no longer own that data and therefore you
no longer have a privacy interest in protecting it. (This was decided in a 1979
case called Smith v. Maryland which has since been applied to uphold the
constitutionality of the NSA’s universal surveillance program of all Americans
even though in 1979 neither cell phones nor e-mail existed.)
When Charles and I
watched the movie J. Edgar I
noted that J. Edgar Hoover had dreamed of one day having an FBI file on every
single American that would include in-depth information on his or her political
beliefs and affiliations as well as personal financial data and other indicia that
might predict criminal behavior, and though the movie presented this as an
impossibility, it struck me that Hoover had simply been ahead of his time. The
Internet and its ability to collect data, automatically and unobtrusively, 24/7
on everyone who uses it has made Hoover’s dream — impossible in his lifetime —
not only technologically possible but also real. This Frontline documentary also explodes the carefully constructed
myth that the NSA was only collecting “metadata” — i.e., information about who was
making phone calls, who was receiving them and where both parties were when
they took place — and not inspecting the content of the calls. They are inspecting the content of the calls, and the
precedent was set by Google, which introduced G-mail in 2004 with the intent of
making money off scanning people’s (presumably) private communications so they
could profile them and sell those profiles to advertisers for targeted
marketing campaign. And under the “freedom of contract” doctrine of Smith v. Maryland — the legal doctrine that no one has to work for, or do business with, a giant
corporation, and in particular no one has to have phone service (or e-mail, or Internet), and once you make the
totally voluntary decision to have a phone (or a computer, or a cell phone, or
a tablet — and any mobile device
automatically puts you under surveillance every minute of every day, even
if you have turned it off), the data you
have provided the company so it can give you that service becomes the company’s
property and is therefore fair game for government requests. That is the world we are living in, one in which
government and corporate power have come together to record our innermost
thoughts and most private communications continually and store them in huge
data banks — and all this is happening simply because it can: because modern-day governments (including ones in
nominally republican countries like the U.S.) can keep watch on us all the time
and thereby fulfill the dreams of J. Edgar Hoover and the people who ran the
KGB and Stasi to discover all political dissent and nip it in the bud.
