Privacy in the Internet Age
Friday, February 10, 2006
|
|
|
|
The revelation that the National Security Agency, under orders from President George W. Bush, is eavesdropping on telephone conversations between people overseas and American citizens at home without benefit of a court order sent much of official Washington into full frenzy mode. The ACLU and the usual gang of Bush bashers immediately called for the President's impeachment while the regular gang of Bush defenders led by the Wall Street Journal thanked the stars for a government which would protect us by listening in on al-Qaeda's telephone calls. In other words, it has been politics as usual.
Asked at a recent news conference why he did not submit details of the eavesdropping program to Congress or to the special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as many believe that law requires, the President said, "... the FISA law was written in 1978. We're having this discussion in 2006. It's a different world. And FISA is still an important tool. It's an important tool. And we still use that tool. But also -- and we -- look -- I said, look, is it possible to conduct this program under the old law? And people said, it doesn't work in order to be able to do the job we expect us to do."
We'll leave it for Congress and the courts to figure out if the Constitution's charge that the President "... take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,..." (Art. II Sec 4) can be reconciled with his statement. But we will note, as a matter of historical record, that Americans have always had a desire for privacy, and have been battling government and business to protect it since the early days of the republic. With each advance in technology, the battle has gotten harder.
The authors of the Constitution thought it was clear when they established the powers of the Federal government that powers not explicitly granted could not be assumed. "We the people" were not so trusting. The result was the Bill of Rights, ten amendments to the original document that enumerated things the government could not do.
The Fourth Amendment protects "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." and describes in some detail what the government must do to meet the standard of "reasonableness". This has led to our current regime where most government searches require a warrant issued by a court, acting on assurances under oath that there is probable cause the search will produce evidence of wrongdoing.
The founding fathers, of course, could not foresee the day when people would converse from their homes using an electronic device and the government could listen in by going to the telephone company's central office and attaching a few wires; or when government agents could sit in a car outside a home, point a microphone at a window and listen in to the conversations taking place inside by picking up the vibrations of the sound waves on the glass; or when a provider of Internet service could route a customer's electronic mail and details of her Internet browsing to computers at the National Security Agency to be sifted, indexed, archived and correlated.
So each technological advance has brought new levels of data gathering by government and, in turn, brought rounds of lawsuits and Congressional hearings into the propriety of the government action. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is just one legislative response on the books, trying to define what the government can and cannot do in this area.
But what most Americans are only now beginning to realize is that the Fourth Amendment restricts the government, not the collection of information by private parties. Here what laws exists are much less restrictive.
This was not much of a problem when information collected by one company from its customers sat in its filing cabinets alone.
Today everywhere we go in the electronic world we leave our "fingerprints". Information you give one company can be digitized, placed on line for immediate access, and often sold or shared with other companies. Modern technology permits the correlation of information, producing relationships between diverse data in ways never before possible. This allows a researcher to build up a detailed profile of an individual based on numerous data points he supplied but never expected would be combined. Privacy, in the Internet age, has become an illusive dream.
This so-called "Data Mining" has become a big business. Look up a name using one of the leading Internet search engines. You will probably be presented with paid advertisements from companies offering to sell you all sorts of information about that person, some culled from public records but some, like cell phone calling history, from sources you would have thought were private. Companies can buy the names and addresses of potential customers qualified by their estimated incomes and previous buying habits, gathered from a variety of sources.
Laws governing this type of information gathering are few and far between and there have been several reported attempts by government to set up operations similar to those already in place in private industry. A recent story in the Christian Science Monitor details a system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) in considerable detail. It may be time for "We the People" to revisit the question and ask how much privacy we want to give up in the Internet Age.
