[This post is the the third in a series (1, 2).]
Like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I want it all.
I want my data to be free, I want to be in control of it and I want to have control over my privacy as well. Is that too much to ask? The watchdog group Privacy International released their annual report today about privacy around the world and put the US in the lowest category – “endemic surveillance societies.” Can we figure out how we can minimize surveillance while balancing privacy and the incredible opportunities that come from making at least some of our data open?
In the background of Marshall’s overview of contemporary privacy issues are discussions of our “post-privacy era.” Chris Messina, who has been involved in developing standards and technologies for handling personal data on the internet, writes:
My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with the advent of increasingly ubiquitous and promiscuous technologies, the results of which are not all necessarily bad (take a look at just how captivating the Facebook Newsfeed is!)
Still … there needs to be a robust dialogue about what it means to live in a post-privacy era, and what demands we must place on those companies, governments and institutions that store data about us, about the habits to which we’re prone and about the friends we keep…
I think there needs to be a broader, eyes-wide-open look at who has what data about whom and what they’re doing about — and perhaps more importantly — how the people about whom the data is being collected can get in on the game and get access to this data in the same way you’re guaranteed access and the ability to dispute your credit report. The same thing should be true for web services, the government and anyone else who’s been monitoring you, even if you’ve been sharing that information with them willingly.
The history of the US government’s surveillance of its own citizens says to me that privacy has actually always been an illusion. Old FBI files show the government maintaining decades worth of minutia on people’s affiliations and associations. For example, in close to 1000 pages of FBI documents that I have on the Greater NY Council for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the early 1960s (when my father was the Executive Director), for practically every person mentioned there are lists of political meetings they were known to have attended and organizations they had been members of, often dating back to the 1940s.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 20, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that among hundreds of recently declassified intelligence documents from the 1950s was a 1950 proposal by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty….
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
The revelation was noted briefly by a couple of major blogs and discussed at some length by smintheus at DailyKos. All have been quick to note the parallels between Hoover’s attempt to suspend Habeas Corpus and the current travails of our fair and essential writ. Both the NY Times and smintheus emphasize that there is no evidence Hoover’s plan was approved.
Smintheus argues that horrible though it was that Truman created loyalty boards, it was to preempt
something even more abusive of civil liberties. Truman also feared that something truly evil might be stirred up by Hoover, whom he loathed. Truman told Clark Clifford on May 2, 1947 that he “wants to be sure and hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo’”. Truman believed, rightly I think, that Hoover had assembled enough dirt on members of Congress that they would give in to almost any of Hoover’s demands. In fact within hours of taking the oath of office in 1945, the President had his eye on the manipulative Hoover (Hoover had sent over to the White House a young FBI agent from Truman’s home town, to chat the new President up).
So the background to this notorious decision from 1947 illustrates that Truman, far from indifferent to the Bill of Rights, instead believed that he was fighting as best he could on its behalf. His profound skepticism of the FBI Director was both a personal as well as a politically savvy judgment. For all his faults (including cronyism, occasional ineptitude, stubbornness), Truman was at least a very sharp, self-reflective, and principled man. Such a person has the potential to rise above his times.
The impression one gets from reading the Times and smintheus is that though those were dark times, we averted something potentially much worse, in no small part because of Truman’s leadership.
Smintheus may be correct about Truman’s motive and strategy, but I don’t think halting mass detentions actually ameliorates the dangerousness of Hoover’s activities. Then and now, the news that the mass detentions did not occur is something of a red herring.
Actually, Hoover’s proposed suspension of Habeas Corpus and mass detentions is not news. The document reported on in the NY Times is new, but the plans have been known since The Church Committee’s famous 1976 Congressional report on “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
Mass detentions—as well as illegal surveillance practices by the NSA—should be vigorously opposed, of course. But the fundamental problem is data mining as an approach to intelligence. Data mining is the basis for mass detentions and the emphasis on data mining as a method leads to illegal surveillance activities.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 29, 2007 at 2:00 am
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