Data is the New Oil

After the terrorist attacks in 2001, the Bush Administration issued warrantless surveillance under Title II of the Patriot Act. President Obama reinstated this act in May of 2011. Since the reinstatement, many people have questioned what the NSA is really doing with the surveillance obtained by the Patriot Act and Edward Snowden seemed to have found the answer. Edward Snowden, an ex CIA employee, took a huge risk during his time at Booz Allen Hamilton by stealing top-secret documents. That wasn’t the end of his rampage; he then decided to inform Americans of the information he stole. After immediately being accused of espionage, Snowden took asylum in Russia, which furthered the accusations that he was a spy and was working with the KGB. Since his initial interview in June, Snowden has continued to release more and more information about the NSA, which has forced the government to address these issues to the public. More recently, tech companies have been under scrutiny by the public because of the distrust they have. The distrust originates from the rules being set by the NSA and government to regulate the tech companies. This blatant violation of the fourth amendment towards all citizens questions the privacy that the government is impeding on. The government should not be entitled to privacy if the public is not allowed this same privilege.

The whole premise of the government spying on everyone wasn’t really an issue until Edward Snowden made it one. During his time at Booze Allen, he started to dig deeper into the NSA than he was authorized to. He was in a position of privileged access, which gave him more access than the broader employee to this highly classified information. Snowden began to see more and more of the abuses that were taking place. Unlike his coworkers who just let the matter rest and continued on with their work, Snowden felt compelled to talk about it. As he began to talk about it with other employees, he was hushed and was told that it was not a problem. He then realized that his coworkers should not be the ones to dictate if this matter was considered important, that was the publics’ job. Snowden discovered that the NSA domestically targets the communications of everybody, filters and analyzes the communication and then finally stores this data in case they might need it at a later time. Snowden tried out this system of surveillance during his time at Booz Allen Hamilton. He was given enough authority that he could wire tap anybody he wanted “even the president, if I had a personal email.” Snowden felt that the public had the right to know what was going on behind closed doors. When asked about what made him want to go public with this info, this was his response:

"I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public, but neither of these things we were allowed to discuss, we were allowed no, even the wider body of our elected representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programs and that’s a dangerous thing."

He felt that the citizens that were being watched should know the secret actions that the government was taking without permission. He also believed that it is not the place of the government to decide if the policies being implemented were right or wrong, rather the public should decide because it directly affects them.

When Snowden came out with these accusations of the government and NSA, the President had no choice but to make a statement to defend the government. The White House maintains that the program is lawful, even in spite of a U.S. privacy-policy board concluding that the bulk data collection is illegal and should be stopped. President Barack Obama has directed the Justice Department to defend many of the policies of George W. Bush, including warrantless wiretapping, which started after the terrorist attacks in 2001. While Obama plans to stop the NSA from keeping phone records, the president defended electronic spying in his most recent speech addressing the matter. Former President Bush believes that there needs to be a proper balance between security and civil liberties. That is easy for him to say because he is on the inside of what is going on in this situation, more hyperbolically he has his cake and can eat it too. The chief of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, made such bold and preposterous statements about Edwards Snowden, claiming that Snowden will become an alcoholic, even though he has never drank in his life. People that are firm supporters of the NSA spying were doing everything to discredit Snowden, even if it included absurd lies.

Even though Snowden knew he would be scrutinized and charged with espionage, he still went public with this information. This brings his intentions into question. He addressed this concern when he went public, and he simply wanted the people to know that the government is spying on all citizens, even if the citizens aren’t currently under suspicion of terrorist activity. Should you do something wrong in the future, they can pull all of your data from the past and use it against you: “They can derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.” He believed citizens should rightfully be informed of this surveillance, which is inevitably why he went public with the information.

Populations around the world are expressing serious indignation at the NSA and at their own government to the extent they have collaborated. Many people, including computer security expert Mikko Hypponen, believe that “we have been hacked by our own government.” He says:

“The United States is fighting the war on terror, but does the government think that every citizen could potentially be a terrorist. Are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight. We are throwing the constitution and bill of rights in the trash because of the existential threat of terrorist. Privacy is non-negotiable, it should be built into all the systems we use, and privacy should be a building block to democracy.”

The more sinister effect of these classified programs is that they effectively create “permanent records” of our daily activities, even in the absence of any wrongdoing on our part.

With each leak from Edward Snowden, who unleashed a trove of documents exposing the U.S. government’s programs to monitor phone call logs and Internet chats, break Web encryption and tap into overseas data cables, Silicon Valley increasingly has had no choice but to opened up in Washington. This includes Twitter, which excoriated the U.S. government in early February 2014, for its transparency practices. A week after tech companies brokered an agreement with the Justice Department that allowed them to disclose new data about national security requests, albeit with strict limits, Twitter said the settlement “violates our First Amendment right to free expression and open discussion of government affairs.” And with it, the company threatened potential legal action. Silicon Valley has been under a lot of scrutiny recently because they are trying not to comply with the NSA requests because it will make users lose their trust, and inevitably business, if they should release the data to the NSA.

Rovio Entertainment Ltd recently was caught it a scandal because there was speculation that the NSA targets one of their most popular apps, Angry Birds, to collect end user data. Rovio made it clear that they do not share data, collaborate or collude with any government spy agencies such as NSA or GCHQ anywhere in the world. The accusation that Rovio is facing is based on information from documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Additionally Lavabit, an encrypted email service, has shut itself down rather than participate in what it calls "crimes against the American people", and in doing so, has gone to the legal limits in order to go public with what has happened. There will undoubtedly be more acts inspired by Snowden's initial choice to unravel his own life to make the world aware of what the US government has been doing in the dark. Using PRISM, the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and five other U.S.-based companies, the NSA could obtain all communications to or from any specified target. The companies had no choice but to comply with the government's request for data.

At stake here is the entire tech business model. Customers use these companies only if they think the data they share with the companies will be kept private. But now that people believe the NSA can break the companies' encryption, users are going to be much more selective of the information they put in cyberspace. Plus, it turns out some companies have been secretly ordered to share data with the NSA. When customers no longer trust these companies, they're less inclined to do business with them, and this becomes a huge problem for some of the biggest companies across the country. Tech fortunes rest on the ability to keep their users' data secure, but the NSA is doing everything in its power to gain access to that data. Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith, released a statement asserting that, “People won’t use technology they don’t trust. Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it.” “Study after study has shown that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free,” he wrote. The lack of privacy that tech companies are now facing is furthering the separation between the government and every other entity within the United States. Not only are individual citizens being monitored and under constant surveillance, but the government is also starting to require data from the tech companies that gather data on the citizens. Next thing, the government will have data and intelligence of every aspect of every American and company that operates within the United States. Not only is data collection by wire-tapping and surveillance unethical, but the government is trying to obtain even more information than readily available, which is explained by the reliance on tech companies. The government is attempting to control every means of communication, even systems they cannot hack into. This is a pressing matter because it shows that there is reason for concern. If the government was not suspecting malicious activities going on, they wouldn’t be demanding this information from tech companies in addition to the surveillance that they have already been doing. 

This is bothersome because it is representative of the fascist dictatorship that will result from the government being all knowing. They are tapping into every resource possible to make sure that no information is kept secret. Currently, it is unclear what the intent of all this stored data will be used for, but one thing is certain and that is that there is data being collected and stored on all Americans. The NSA is creating a library of data, from surveillance to information gathered from tech firms, and is saving it for a rainy day. The information is of no use at the time being, but there is no reason to believe that they won’t go back to this data at a later date and dig up information from the past and turn it into suspicions of terrorist activity.

The culmination of information that Snowden released is not the important itself, rather the idea that the government does not trust the American citizens is more significant. The government has gone to such extremes to make sure that justice will be served should an American decide to engage in unpatriotic acts. These unethical decisions that the government is making, unbeknownst to the general public until recently, has brought the governments intentions into question. The President can speak about how the end goal is to protect America and that the surveillance is for our benefit, but if it truly was for our benefit, we should have the right to know about it. If the US government is genuinely concerned enough about our safety that they are implementing unethical procedures to ensure safety, they should have taken precautionary measures much sooner to prevent all of this from happening in the first place.

This all comes down to the fact that the bulk collection of data is illegal, yet the President still supports this data mining. When you take a step back and try and picture the situation from the eyes of the US government, it makes a little bit more sense. The government is not inherently bad; they are implementing these illegal precautions for our benefit. Should the data mining go as they anticipate, they will be able to crack down on potential terrorists and make the United States a safer place to live. The process of cracking down on surveillance with the hopes of catching terrorists before they do any harm would be a great plan if it could be properly executed. Additionally, the end goal of the US government, which they claim is to prevent future attacks on our nation, seems unfeasible by simply wire tapping into all three hundred million citizens living in the country. The thought that they will be able to filter through that much data and come out with a real victory seems slim to none. In the process, they are losing the trust and faith of the majority of the people by making such questionable and unethical decisions without considering the consequences that they may face. The mutual distrust between the government and the people will just continue to grow if the government does not inform the people of these precautions. As a citizen, it is really hard to trust a government that claims to be doing everything for the good of the nation but continually keeps the citizens in the dark about what is really going on behind closed doors. The only reason the government should be keeping things from the people is if it will genuinely endanger either the government or the people if the truth was out, which is not the case with surveillance. This is our country and our government is spying us on, something just seems unbelievably wrong about that. As the distrust begins to grow between the government and the people, there will be less reason to cooperate and more reason to rebel.

While the United States has the right and obligation to protect its citizens from suspicions of terrorist activity, it ultimately results in a circular reasoning of distrust that will never be resolved. The government will continue to surveillance the citizens for potential acts of terrorism, which will make citizens trust the government even less, which could potentially increase the amount of terrorism within the nation, thus increasing the caliber of surveillance on the citizens. The unethical qualities that the United States is exemplifying by blatantly breaking the most important law that the government put into place centuries ago shows that the government will do everything in it’s power to maintain order within the country. This double standard that the government is setting for itself is doomed to fail because a country that has an unethical leader setting bad examples will most likely result it more unethical (and potentially harmful) decision being made by the citizens. The right to privacy is no longer a right, but rather a privilege once you have proved yourself worthy enough to the government. However, the government seems to be able to keep all of their unethical actions in privacy, thus creating an even larger separation between the people and the state.
  
 Perhaps, once the citizens succumb to the spying that the government will continue to do, it will seem more like totalitarianism state than a democracy. Granted the only difference would be that the “state” ruling over the United States would be the government with the help of top-secret operatives working at the NSA, as opposed to a dictator. Once again, this results in another level of circular reasoning between the NSA and the technology companies that service the NSA. These companies disapprove of the spying that the government is doing on the citizens, and thus do not want to help the government. Realistically, these tech companies really cannot say no to the government, and thus they have to provide their data mines to the NSA. The government should not be entitled to privacy if they are not allowing this same right to be enforced by their constituents, whether it be the citizens of the United States or the tech companies that have the capacity to obtain every piece of data imaginable. The overwhelming circular mess that the government is initiating by breaking the constitutional rights of citizens will continue to be problematic until the government trusts the American citizens more and begins to focus its attention to more important matters elsewhere.