‘Big Brother’ and Big Data The Alternative to Automated Sweeps is More Privacy Invasion.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323495604578535552983978828.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Over the last 72 hours Americans have learned more about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, whose quasi-exposure appears to be a bombshell without a bomb. The political reaction is no saner as a result, but perhaps reality and substance will eventually prevail.
President Obama emerged to defend the NSA on Friday, noting that his assessment of the programs that originated under his predecessor was “that on, you know, net, it was worth us doing” because “they help us prevent terrorist attacks.” He also invited a debate about how we are “striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy, because there are some trade-offs involved.”
Mr. Obama is conceding too much to the folks who imagine the government is compiling dossiers on citizens and listening to calls a la “The Lives of Others.”
The NSA is collecting “metadata”—logs of calls received and sent, and other types of data about data for credit card transactions and online communications. Americans now generate a staggering amount of such information—about 161 exabytes per year, equal to the information stored in 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Organizing and making sense of this raw material is now possible given advances in information technology, high-performance computing and storage capacity. The field known as “big data” is revolutionizing everything from retail to traffic patterns to epidemiology.
Mr. Obama waved off fears of “Big Brother” but he might have mentioned that the paradox of data-mining is that the more such information the government collects the less of an intrusion it is. These data sets are so large that only algorithms can understand them. The search is for trends, patterns, associations, networks. They are not in that sense invasions of individual privacy at all.
If the NSA isn’t scrubbing vast amounts of data, then it can’t discover who is potentially a threat. The alternative to automated sweeps is more pervasive use of lower-tech methods like wiretaps, tracking and searches—in a word, invasions of persons rather than statistical probabilities. The political attack on data-mining could increase rather than alleviate the risk to individual rights.
We also know that this entire process is flyspecked by the special court created by the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which was most recently amended in December with little controversy or even media notice. Our view is that FISA is an encroachment on core executive war powers, but weren’t FISA judges supposed to be the check on President Bush and his mad spymasters? Liberals claimed the scandal over “warrantless wiretaps” was about the warrants, not the wiretaps. Now that they have the warrants they’re denouncing the wiretaps.
We’ve also learned through some very sketchy reporting about another NSA program code-named Prism. This appears to be an adaptation of the Bush-era program that intercepted foreign-to-foreign calls that happened to pass through U.S. switching networks. Mr. Obama says it is only aimed at foreigners. Prism appears to be designed to retrieve foreign communications like emails and digital files from major technology companies.
Though the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper reported otherwise, the NSA says it doesn’t have direct access to the servers of these providers and they only turn over information about foreign targets located outside the U.S. when ordered to do so by the FISA court. While some information on Americans is inevitably grabbed, court-approved “minimization” procedures are designed to limit and dispose of that collection—and disseminating it is prohibited.
The more coherent critics concede that all of this is legal and constitutional but say it is nonetheless an amorphous infringement of civil liberties. Like any government power, it can be abused. But note that Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old who proudly claims he exposed these surveillance programs, has provided no evidence of their abuse.
U.S. officials say NSA’s data-mining uncovered the Najibullah Zazi plot to bomb the New York City subway, while critics insinuate that this might be a lie because the details are “classified.” We agree too much is classified but in this case that is so terrorists don’t know how we might catch them.
What our self-styled civil libertarians should really fear is another successful terror attack like 9/11, or one with WMD. Then the political responses could include biometric national ID cards, curfews, surveillance drones over the homeland, and even mass roundups of ethnic or religious groups. Practices like data-mining save lives, and in doing so they protect against far greater intrusions on individual freedom.
A version of this article appeared June 10, 2013, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: ‘Big Brother’ and Big Data.
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