Secrecy, Surveillance and Privacy: Momus and Moral Ambiguity by NORMAN SIMMS
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/secrecy-surveillance-and-privacy-momus-and-moral-ambiguity
After each of the major terrorist attacks in the last few years, the various so-called Intelligence Services in the United States, Britain and elsewhere have disclosed two important things: first, the perpetrators of these horrendous deeds have been known to the officials and often for many years been “on the radar”; and second, the various security and anti-terrorist organizations claim that they did not have sufficient information or resources to keep these people-usually young men-under proper surveillance. In the light of what the media perceives as scandalous misuse of eaves-dropping technology-tracking all sorts of telephone, internet and other electronic and digital communications-do these two mitigating factors stand up to scrutiny? In other words, are governments engaged in too much secret intelligence work or not enough, or is it a matter of the actual quality of the intelligence deployed to make sense of the information gathered?
Moreover, should we worry about spying on citizens as in itself a justifiable cause of the current outrage, or is it just the sheer numbers of individual men and women and private organizations caught up in the compass or prism of the official spy-networks? Perhaps a lot of the anger and shock actually stems from the paradox of our new kind of world, a world wherein, on the one hand, millions of people link themselves into social networks, keep in touch with other millions of people frequently, and, in the process, willingly or not, expose sensitive information about themselves and their activities, things that were best left unstated, at least in the sense of not revealing them in a permanent way and into an uncontrollable system of electronic-digital form; whereas, on the other hand, the dangerous and explosive world we live in requires that different nations’ security agencies use this vast amount of information to try to protect the lives and well-being of their citizens.
Unless you believe that the threat of terrorism belongs to a huge hoax perpetrated by a conspiratorial collusion of big business, media-moguls and nervous-nellies, the choice has to be made in such a way that balances off hard-fought-for civil rights of privacy and freedom of expression against short-term but necessary curtailment of those same rights.
What are the most important values we want our governments to protect-our individual privacy in all things and events or our lives, property and way of doing business or relating to others? This conundrum takes us back to the long-standing dilemma of how far individual rights can go without limiting or destroying, not just the rights of another individual’s freedoms, but also our collective rights and liberties as a community or related community of groups of all sorts. We do live in large and highly complex societies, no longer in small communities where each person or family knows those around him, and so require some sort of public bodies to evaluate the nature of the ambiguous and misleading environment that hides forces that all too often in our experience break out into acts of violence. We expect government agencies to monitor the contents of medicines, foods and other products that come in glossy wrappers and deceptive camouflage because we are unable to perform these meticulous tasks as individuals or even as small communities.
Checks that Balance and those that Don’t
Nevertheless, since we inhabit-as every generation for the past million years has done-a world where we cannot trust in the intelligence, maturity, honesty or sanity of everyone else, how can we assume that those who are placed in charge of our safety are themselves trustworthy, competent and understanding enough to act wisely and efficiently on behalf of both the individual and the group? In the past, we were taught that there are sufficient checks and balances and enough political transparency to guide us, and that democratic principles and institutions will grant us a reasonable degree of protection. But do they? Can these often creaking pieces of social machinery function well enough in a time of urgency? If not, how may we overhaul them so as to give them greater efficiency without, at the same time, transforming them into juggernauts to crush down precisely what we need to preserve-our personal sense of privacy and integrity? The wheels of justice, to be effective, must occasionally do more than turn slowly; it is occasionally necessary to oil the gears, release the brakes, and surge forward with all our might. Then, when the short-term goal is achieved, the cart can return to a more normal pace.
These emergency measures come up because there are also vast numbers of people, many millions of self-professed enemies of all we treasure and others who inadvertently by their own self-interests are those whom we cannot trust to speak truthfully or to act rationally. What do we do when we cannot distinguish between friend and foe by the language they speak, the religion they profess, the colour of the garments they wear, or the sports teams they cheer on? The ancients wrote about a character called Momus who had a glass front, so that you could see inside its mind and heart, and thus know its feelings, thoughts and intentions, if only you could lift a veil, pull aside a curtain or manoeuvre the creature into the right angle of light. But even then, the problems remained of how to interpret what you saw bubbling around inside the Momus and also of what to do with the information you obtained. Whereas such a mythical being was big and strange enough to call attention to itself, we have to deal with millions of people who, in almost every way, look and act like ourselves, but about whom we no longer can trust appearances. Do we install moral x-ray machines on street corners or decide that everybody with a funny name or a peculiarly-shaped head needs to walk through the investigative contraption?
If we did start to make such profiles, would we be better off than if we decided to spot check every fifth person in the airport or every seventh passer-by on the street? Would it not be better to announce this programme so as to avoid undue shocks in the general populace? I am no longer sure we can trust in most people’s good intentions, honesty and cheerful dispositions. Yet if we work covertly, trying to cause as little discomfort or suspicion as possible, how many blunders would be acceptable, given that no system is fool-proof? Eventually, one might say, by the law of averages, the truth will out. Or maybe not.
Living Precariously in a Dangerous World
At what point do we say enough is enough, or rather, if you don’t play by the rules then the game is over for you? And somebody has to be the umpire.
The puzzle cannot be easily solved, and there may be more danger than not in cutting through the Gordian Knot. Delicacy, finesse, patience and a constant re-assessment of the situation are called for. Sometimes, it is true, whistle-blowers are heroes, yet at other times they are merely naïve pests, and sometimes even they are out and out traitors or self-deluded fanatics. Sometimes we have to err on the side of caution and call in the marines; at other times it may be better to send in a single well-trained undercover agent (or spy) to investigate; and then again there are times when we have to take a deep breath and wait to see what happens.
Transparency and Translucence
Nor can the parameters of the rules of the game, either for the surveillance techniques themselves nor of their application in real-time situations, leave out the most disturbing factor of all: the promiscuous distribution and use of the information gathers for commercial purposes. It is one thing for governments to act decisively in a period of terrorist threats and another to sustain the intrusive breaks into individual privacy on behalf of unscrupulous business practices. There is more here than allowing advertising gurus to track down our domestic purchases online or our frequenting of entertainment sites; there is the unethical attempts to create psychological profiles and then to exploit the propensities of individuals, families and groups to endanger their own health or financial well-being.
Transparency may in many, even in most instances, be what we need when bureaucrats, politicians and professional officers take decisions and supposedly act on our behalf; yet not all the time, and we need sometimes to accept a bit of translucence, that is, the wisdom and the courage and, naturally, the mechanisms to allow for secrecy and strategic deceitfulness. It would be wonderful if everyone were nice and the world were fair, but they ain’t…
Norman Simms is the author of Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash (Academic Studies Press, 2011). The second volume in the series, Alfred Dreyfus: In the Context of His Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet and Jew should be out towards the end of this year; and a third volume tentatively entitled Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: Illusions, Delusions and Allusions is being prepared for 2013.
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