If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know I’m skeptical of a lot of what the government does, but I’m also skeptical of a lot of the conspiracies about the government, too. One popular conspiracy is that the government is tracking and recording all electronic communications of US citizens – emails, phone calls, texts, and everything else, and storing it all in a giant NSA data center in Utah. Statements by former officials, rumors of backdoors in social networks, and other assorted revelations are all counted as evidence.
Now I’m very concerned about government overreach and invasion of privacy, but I’m not convinced the government has total surveillance (yet). Nevermind the assumption that the government is competent enough to either keep up with every new technology company and force them to comply without any of them ever spilling the beans, or advanced enough to sniff and decode all the wireless packets. My main evidence for this is the steady stream of overreaches involving the government trying to get information it didn’t have already!
The latest, of course, is the secret Department of Justice subpoena of Associated Press phone records from Verizon. We’ve also recently learned about the FBI reprogramming someone’s air card so they could track it. And Google and Twitter have started releasing the numbers of record requests they get from the US government, among others.
Certainly these are all troubling invasions of privacy, but the very fact that privacies had to be invaded in these ways suggests that the Total Invasion Of Privacies isn’t happening already.
Now some will say that the NSA stores it all but the other agencies don’t have access to it, or that they do but they can’t use it in court so they still have to look like they got it legally. But aren’t many of these secret subpoenas and warrantless tapping and so forth illegal anyway, and part of what makes them so controversial? Besides, if the government tracks everything but doesn’t tell anyone or use it, what’s the point? (Well, we would still be at risk for the Oops Cost.)
I wouldn’t put a whole lot of confidence in my position, and it’s probably prudent to assume that your digital communications are always being monitored. But I would love to hear a better explanation for what seems to be a big hole in that logic.