Balkinization: Why Worry (About the Surveillance State)?

Very interesting conversation. A couple thoughts if I may...

1) The comparison between the Cold War and the War on Terror is not particularly useful.

To start, there is no deterrence in the WOT. You must stop the enemy before he strikes. The Cold War was waged between fixed nation states with a self preservation motive. Thus, you could have a check like Mutually Assured Destruction to keep the sides from going nuclear. However, in the WOT, the enemy is a stateless death cult. There is no nation against which to retaliate and much of the death cult do not mind dying if they can inflict a nuclear holocaust on the US.

Additionally, the enemy in the WOT is much more difficult to find. al Qaeda conducts its business entirely in the shadows while nation states activities are much more open because of scale if nothing else. For example, it will be much more difficult to find and stop an al Qaeda cell with a nuke than it was to identify the Soviet movement of nuclear weapons to Cuba and stop it.

Consequently, because there is the WOT enemy must be preempted and is more difficult to find, intelligence gathering is far more important than it was in the past. Thus, the utilitarian balance between intelligence gathering and personal privacy is tipping towards intelligence gathering.

2) Both Jack and Eric make good points concerning a potential national surveillance state.

Jack acknowledges that there is little risk of the government conducting big brother style surveillance to suppress political freedom. Instead, he is worried about a loss of generic privacy because we place so much of our personal information out where it can be observed by private and public entities.

However, is this a true "surveillance state?" Surveillance implies not only a potential loss of privacy, but that someone is actually invading our privacy by listening to or reading our communications.

Eric makes a valid point that it is physically impossible to monitor read or listen to even a tiny fraction of the incredible mass of communications generated by the citizenry. As I have pointed out before concerning the TSP, even if you dedicated every government employee to the task, the communications they could physically listen to or read is miniscule and the number of government employees actually dedicated to surveillance is a tiny fraction of all government employees.

What Jack is observing is less the government engaging in surveillance to strip away our privacy than an increasing willingness of the citizenry to disclose formerly private information to public scrutiny.

I did not see either Jack or Eric really come to grips with the actual implications of the new data processing revolution. Recent data processing advances do not allow the NSA to consume large volumes of communications. That still takes actual people to listen or read the communications. Rather, data mining enables the NSA to locate individual communicators based upon profiles of how they interact with our information grid. In short, where it was possible for a person to go to ground and disappear in the population like a needle in a stack of needles, the NSA now has the power to find those people.

It is unclear to me how this new capability threatens the generic privacy of the average person living in the open, but this capability does strip the "privacy" from those who are attempting to hide from the state for whatever reason. It is an open question as to whether this capability can eventually morph into a real threat to an average American's legitimate expectations of privacy.

3) I would finally note that Eric and even to a certain extent Jack are far too trusting of government motives in this area. Eric does not see the possibility that the government would use these new weapons against the citizenry and Jack implies that the government is unlikely to engage in the same old invasions of privacy again, but will find new ones. However, if you give the government a power and then neglect to supervise the government, I guarantee the government will abuse that power in both old and new ways.

This is not an argument to deny the government necessary tools to defend the nation, though. The new data processing weapons are crucial to fight and win wars against shadow enemies with WMD hiding among the population and cannot be abandoned. Instead, the new technological weapons simply reinforce the need for our elected representatives to conduct ongoing oversight of the bureaucracies entrusted with the weapons and upon each other.

# posted by

Bart DePalma : 5:43 PM

Very interesting conversation. A couple thoughts if I may...

1) The comparison between the Cold War and the War on Terror is not particularly useful.

To start, there is no deterrence in the WOT. You must stop the enemy before he strikes. The Cold War was waged between fixed nation states with a self preservation motive. Thus, you could have a check like Mutually Assured Destruction to keep the sides from going nuclear. However, in the WOT, the enemy is a stateless death cult. There is no nation against which to retaliate and much of the death cult do not mind dying if they can inflict a nuclear holocaust on the US.

Interestingly enough, the RW hawks in the Reagan maladministration had been pushing just such a view of the Soviet generals ("there is no deterring them") in arguing for the most hawkish and confrontational positions (and for arms buildups and the "Star Wars" program). This included the proto-neocons Cheney and Perle.

For the details, I suggest Pulitzer prizewinner Richard Rhodes's latest book, "Arsenals of Folly".

The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh? Until we rid ourselves of the neocon infestation....

Cheers,

# posted by

Arne Langsetmo : 8:16 PM

... it will be much more difficult to find and stop an al Qaeda cell with a nuke than it was to identify the Soviet movement of nuclear weapons to Cuba and stop it.

Another difference is that it is much easier to keep small actors from getting nukes than it is large ones like the Soviet Union (just as it was easier for them to develop them than it would be for some small group w/o lots of handy-dandy reactors or the massive powerp[lants needed to run large arrays of centrifuges) ... if you identify the means for preventing this and pursue them....

I'd also note that the particular means by which a terrorist organisation might slip nukes into the U.S. are available just as well to any competent large state actors that actually have nukes already.

But, with that, I'll bow out on this little side-track that would be best discussed on "Bart"'s own blog, as it is not particularly germane to the topic of Prof. Lederman's post ... and I apologise for my contributions to the distraction.

Cheers,

# posted by

Arne Langsetmo : 8:25 PM

Recent data processing advances do not allow the NSA to consume large volumes of communications....

And the support for this rather broad claim?: _________________

... That still takes actual people to listen or read the communications. Rather, data mining enables the NSA to locate individual communicators based upon profiles of how they interact with our information grid. In short, where it was possible for a person to go to ground and disappear in the population like a needle in a stack of needles, the NSA now has the power to find those people....

... and listen to them. MLKII, your mother's calling.....

There seems implicit in the above-quoted argument the claim that better and more comprehensive technical capabilities lead to less intrusiveness (due to some "information overload", I presume). But that's hardly true; there's probably a similar number of people around to sit and listen, in the end, and there's better capabilities to collect, isolate and find out the "good stuff", whether for better or for worse.

Cheers,

# posted by

Arne Langsetmo : 8:34 PM

It is unclear to me how this new capability threatens the generic privacy of the average person living in the open, ...

... as long as they're leading "normal and approved" lives, and not making waves....

... but this capability does strip the "privacy" from those who are attempting to hide from the state for whatever reason.

I'm sure the KGB would have concurred.

Cheers,

# posted by

Arne Langsetmo : 8:37 PM

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# posted by

Unknown : 2:41 AM