Out of the Barn 2

The nightly cable new outrage festival was in full swing last night amid reports by the Washington Post and The Guardian that federal agencies had “back doors” into the servers of Silicon Valley companies to spy on Americans, ostensibly for collecting information on us to protect us against terrorism. I’d like to be able to tell you I’m surprised, but am not, and can only get outraged up to a point.

The story, of course, is bad news for the Obama administration, and casts the President himself as something of a hypocrite. While campaigning for office, he was critical of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program, but the Post report reveals that he certainly can’t pretend he’s a champion of privacy.

While the government’s PRISM program is intended as a national security tool and is supposed to make us feel safer, in many respects it does exactly the opposite. If the government can collect information on all of us for national security reasons, the obvious fear is, suppose at some point down the road, the government decides to use this capability for other reasons?

That said, the civil libertarians can burst their blood vessels about big government, but they and the rest of us don’t get nearly as exercised about the data mining that’s already going on by the private corporations we all connect or deal with and what’s being done with that information about us. There is just as much potential for harm, if not more.

We do have to ask ourselves about our own complicity in all of this. Most of us carry devices that report exactly where we are at all times. Every time we use the Internet to look something up – maybe on a site we wouldn’t care to have others know we visited – that visit is being logged someplace, and presumably could come back to bite us later on.

And, I just can’t wait to hear the screams after private aerial drones go into widespread use. We’d better start thinking about getting ourselves fitted for lead-foil suits.

Although the Post story doesn’t surprise me, I certainly recognize the beneficial effect of investigative reporting like this. More than a year ago, I observed here that the privacy horse had long since left the barn. There may not be a lot we can do about that, but at least some entity is telling us where the horse is headed. And though it may be inconvenient, we still have a fundamental individual choice about whether we go along for the ride.

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