I ran across this post by cpbotha on Reddit yesterday. He details the various steps he’s taken to protect himself from NSA spying. I’ve taken quite a few of these steps myself, particularly with regard to switching my personal email provider off of Google (I’m now using Privatdemail.net, which is non-US based and therefor out of the Fed’s jurisdiction, and doesn’t keep copies of your data). I’ve also switched away from Google as my search engine of choice to Startpage (they don’t keep records of your search terms and say they aren’t working with the NSA) stopped using Chrome (now using Tor’s browser based off Firefox). Fortunately, I’m not with a US ISP so I’m somewhat more protected, by I still haven’t started encrypting my emails (many of which are sent to people with Gmail accounts, so the NSA has access to them) and I’m still using Dropbox for my cloud storage, despite the fact that they open and read all of your documents. I’m working on switching everything over to a self-hosted file-storage server, but that’s going to have to wait for a few more hardware purchases before I can get that going.
It may seem silly to be this concerned about privacy issues when I’m 1) a blogger and 2) active on social media. Visibility is something I’m trying to court, not run away from. But despite my desire for visibility, both for myself and my clients, I still want (and think I have the right) for the visibility to be on my terms. I don’t think use of the Internet gives the government implicit rights to my financial and health data, for example. I don’t want the NSA sharing the content of my personal emails with the IRS, local law enforcement, CIA, FBI and DEA, for example. Particularly if they were to use evidence gathered illegally to construct a legal case against me and then lie about the source of that evidence in court. I’m particularly troubled that US allies are detaining the spouses of journalists reporting on the NSA story, threatening them with terrorism charges, and then confiscating their property. I now find myself wondering if this very blog post will now put me in danger of having my laptop, phone, and eReader confiscated the next time I pass through a US airport.
I’m bothered that the NSA is spying on foreign companies, because if they’ll spy on Petrobras, there’s no reason they won’t spy on my company. And if they have access to my company’s private documents, they could potentially pass them on to their technology partners in the private sector. Or even if all of the 30,000 employees of the NSA are upstanding citizens who wouldn’t abuse their power for something like spying on their girlfriends, It freaks me out that Edward Snowden has the ability to monitor my search activity in real time. Or that the police can decide to label environmental groups as terrorist organizations and spy on them to prevent peaceful, legal protests. Or that they’re handing your credit card number, passwords, and account information to foreign countries.
Perhaps you disagree with me, and you believe that allowing all branches of the US government to have unrestricted access to all of our data, all the time, without the need to justify those search and seizures to a judge. Fine. But if you believe that, then the law has to be changed. The NSA is perfectly able to make an argument to the American people and to Congress that it absolutely needs to have these powers to do its job, and that having access to these powers generates more benefits than liabilities for a society as a whole. Then we can decide, as a society, whether we want to grant the NSA such omnipotent powers by collectively amending the Constitution to repeal the Fourth Amendment. I’d disagree with that move, but I’d admit that it’s at least legal. What the NSA is doing now is, quite simply, ignoring laws it doesn’t like.
But democracy doesn’t work like that. No one can just choose to ignore laws it finds inconvenient: not you, not me, not the NSA. In particular, we can’t break the law and then lie about it to Congress. It’s impossible to have a reasonable debate on a surveillance program if the very existence of that program is itself classified.
And we should all be worried that the NSA has taken steps to systematically weaken encryption throughout the Internet. Even if you have “nothing to hide,” as they say, the NSA’s efforts to make Internet communication less secure makes your data more vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves. So even if you trust the NSA’s intentions, their actions make you much more vulnerable to criminals everywhere. It’s as if, in order to give itself access to everyone’s homes at all times, the police prohibited the use of door locks. Yes, it gives the government access to all your stuff whenever they want it, but it also gives every criminal equal access.
Anyway, I don’t want this post to go on for too much longer, and I’ll likely write more about the subject in the future. Let me leave you with this last thought:
Disagree? Think I’m a communist? Dangerous anarchist? Idealistic fool? Let me know in the comments.
