PRISM Hysteria
Here’s Why It’s Much Ado About Nothing
PRISM, the Government’s information surveillance program, has been at the top of domestic news over the last two weeks. There has been a great deal of breathless reporting about it and open ended questions about whether the U.S. has become the police society envisioned by George Orwell’s 1984. There are a number of reasons why I believe that much of this crisis has been manufactured.
There’s no question that the media has been adding gasoline to this story. It’s a big story, but by no means a crisis. From my own perspective the outrage that I see generated exists mostly on the part of those covering the story and pundits. The response to PRISM on the part of the public has been more “ho-hum.”
I think the public has got PRISM right. Remember we’re talking about the Government capturing meta-data. We’re talking about billions of bytes of information about phone numbers. No body is listening to your calls. There’s just too much information.
This is not Richard Nixon’s “Enemies’ List” from the 1970′s. There is always the potential for the Government to exceed the bounds of ethics and the law. It has, unfortunately, frequently done so. Anyone who breaks the law should be punished accordingly.
At this point, there is no evidence that the PRISM program has broken any laws. Everything that was done was done legally, and it turns out that a number of Congress were briefed on a regular basis. We may not like the program. We may think its spirit is antithetical to some of our values, but that’s really a policy question, not a legal question.
It seems that many Americans, the media included, knew that something like this was going on. How were we tracking terrorists? Did anyone ever think that we knew their mobile numbers from the get go? Perhaps what’s shocking is that we’ve suddenly been afforded a look under the under. To mix a metaphor, perhaps we don’t like how the sausage is actually being made. Again, that’s a policy question, not a legal question.
President Obama has said that compromises have to be made between privacy and security. It’s a balance. It’s interesting to note that just a few weeks ago there was impatience when the Tsarnaev brothers were not pegged immediately as the perpetrators behind the Boston Bombing. Well, if you want that information immediately you need to provide the means to obtain it.
What about ad tracking? If you’re concerned about the Government, you should be concerned about your privacy online. Companies are routinely gathering information about you online. And it’s not just phone numbers. Assume that anything you put down in social media is being tracked. Companies know about all of your preferences, sexual, social and commercial.
Here’s a caveat. Anyone who breaks the law and/or lies about what’s going on about it should be punished accordingly. That includes National Intelligence DirectorJames Clapper. On the other hand, I don’t expect our spy agencies to be forthcoming publicly with all of the details about national intelligence and security operations. They are, after all, supposed to be secret.
For more on privacy and data security, check out Gotham Media’s PrivacyNet blog.
