For the better part of the last year, my attention has been focused on the silent slipping away of rights 1 that Americans are victims of. Victims is a loaded word, but I’m using it here to emphasize that even though we are complicit and have actively hit the ‘i agree’ button on the privacy policies, it was a long, shallow, slippery slope that now that we’re significantly sliding going back up to the top of the hill look unsurmountable. And the slide has been kind of fun, so why put in the work anyway?
In this essay, I’m going to lay out what is happening, why we should care, and what we should do about it.
What is happening
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
When I was in high school I was enamored by the topics in my U.S. government class. Mr. Mitchell, a pot-bellied, mustachioed, flannel-wearing, small-town bachelor presented the bill of rights to us in a way that captivated my passion. I learned about what had been done to create a government that worked for the people, instead of the people working for the government (a first, if I’m not mistaken). This information deeply inspired me. People that had come before me had evolved to such a level as to stand up for what was honorable, what they believed was right, and violently opposed an oppressor.
When I first read the fourth amendment, I’ll admit, it was one of the ones that made my eyes gloss over. But remember this was the early 2000’s. 9/11 had recently occurred, and we definitely weren’t worried about our government doing unwarranted searches on us. Our people were secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects. However, as noted by Richard Stallman 1, we definitely should have been on the look out for abuse.
The worst damage from many nerve injuries is secondary — it happens in the hours after the initial trauma, as the body’s reaction to the damage kills more nerve cells. Researchers are beginning to discover ways to prevent this secondary damage and reduce the eventual harm.
If we are not careful, the deadly attacks on New York and Washington will lead to far worse secondary damage, if the U.S. Congress adopts “preventive measures” that take away the freedom that America stands for.
I’m not talking about searches at airports here. Searches of people or baggage for weapons, as long as they check only for weapons and keep no records about you if you have no weapons, are just an inconvenience; they do not endanger civil liberties. What I am worried about is massive surveillance of all aspects of life: of our phone calls, of our email, and of our physical movements.
These measures are likely to be recommended regardless of whether they would be effective for their stated purpose. An executive of a company developing face recognition software is said to be telling reporters that widespread deployment of face-recognizing computerized cameras would have prevented the attacks. The September 15 New York Times cites a congressman who is advocating this “solution.” Given that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer face recognition would help. But that won’t stop the agencies that have always wanted to do more surveillance from pushing this plan now, and many other plans like it. To stop them will require public opposition.
Even more ominously, a proposal to require government back doors in encryption software has already appeared.
Meanwhile, Congress hurried to pass a resolution giving Bush unlimited power to use military force in retaliation for the attacks. Retaliation may be justified, if the perpetrators can be identified and carefully targeted, but Congress has a duty to scrutinize specific measures as they are proposed. Handing the president carte blanche in a moment of anger is exactly the mistake that led the United States into the Vietnam War.
Please let your elected representatives, and your unelected president, know that you don’t want your civil liberties to become the terrorists’ next victim. Don’t wait — the bills are already being written.
Fast forward twenty five years, and Stallman’s forecast has largely come true. When we walk through airports, there is facial recognition devices everywhere. Now, in most cities and small towns, there is facial recognition in the streets. Our movements are tracked via corporations that collude with the government, and our search history, our brand preferences, and even our most intimate thoughts are now being stored and centralized on servers in behemouth data centers that are being built at an appalling rate.
A couple of things here that make this more dangerous than it sounds even on the surface. The first the third party doctrine2. The court cases that normalized this are a bit complicated, but you can find a lot of information about it on wikipedia if you care to dive a bit deeper. It has been challenged, and is generally recognized as short-sighted for the digital age, but it is the current way that enforcement agencies are legally able to use data that corporations collect on you for their investigations.
A second thing that should get your hackles up is centralization. Centralized control of anything is a tool of oppression. Think of the monarchy our founding fathers overthrew. Power corrupts, and abolute power corrupts absolutely is one of the quotes I would use in my L/D debates as a teenager, and it has such a potent warning for the new era we find ourselves in. Power right now is in the hands of a few corporations. They have been collecting our data for a few decades now and storing it on centralized servers. Now, with the advancements in machine learning, those centralized data become a large data lake 3 that those intelligent, pattern predicitng models can swim around in to make connections that would have taken an army and enormous resources before about three years ago.
So where does that leave us? To put it bluntly, in the opening chapters of 1984. Most people you know are blindly scrolling their screens4, listening to the voice, buying daily necessities on amazon, and not thinking anything is wrong. But in the back of your mind, if you’re being honest, there is a little voice, or a feeling that something isn’t quite right. This little voice I’m talking about is the reason I use the word victim at the top of this essay lightly. I do think we all know that this isn’t right, but its just so hard to put your finger on anything through the swamp of delightful brain rot.
Why everyone actually cares
I’m not going to frame any shoulds here. I’ve been trained through countless hours of therapy that shoulds don’t really get us anywhere. But the thing is, when it comes to privacy a lot of people say that “they have nothing to hide”5, or “they’ve already got my information anyway”6, or “I kind of like all this convenience, I’m willing to give up a little about me to make that possible”. And those impulses are exactly what they have primed you to think. If you think hard enough, all of those things you’ve either heard someone say, or read it somewhere, or maybe you saw it some form of digital media. But trust me, I’ve heard these things enough to infer that those type of excuses are not original thought. When everyone repeats something frequently, it becomes truth through lots of mechanisms. I dont know a lot about meme theory, but I have a feeling that this is it. One of the reasons that you might think, even if the thought isnt orginal, that it is still true, is that all of these things ARE true. But the fact of them being true doesnt make them right. Just like someone being burgled from, for example might say “well, I have nothing i wouldnt share anyway”, or “locks only keep honest people honest” or “I really think its inconvenient to lock my things away”. All of these things might be true, but we still actively protect ourselves, to the best of our ability to keep the burglers out.
** as an aside, we also dont give the police keys to our houses. If they asked us to, we might revolt… for now. But this slippery slope we’re on means that scenario isnt that strangely distopyian…
So I make the case that while you might not think about privacy much, you actually do care about it. Just like you probably dont think about the air you breathe until its is polluted or absent, you care about privacy. Once its gone, you wont know when it slipped away. So we should all get together and do something about it.
What can I do about it
Individual action is the root of collective action. So do something. Its easy to say that small action will cascade into a more robust stance, and its also to not be very inspired by that. If you are a busy human that doesn’t have time to spend a month boycotting all the big tech companies, just take it one step at a time.
There is a really excellent resource called privacy guides which can give you some basic things to do in your everyday life. Protect yourself from malicious actors (password managers, encrypted messaging), corporate surveillance (privacy focused browsers, using ad blockers)
Footnotes
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By Richard StallmanCopyright 2001 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted in any medium provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved ↩ ↩2
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https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/third-party-doctrine/ ↩
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Sorry if I’m misusing this term, technically, data enthusiasts! I’m new to this computer science space, but I do think the term encapsulates the idea, even if not technically correct. ↩
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I literally watched a coworker fall asleep while scrolling short-form social media… and his thumb KEPT SCROLLING ↩
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This was me ↩
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me too ↩