There is no fundamental difference between the NSA’s data mining and eavesdropping operations and a live in agent listening to all your conversations and downloading your browser history. We are all harboring a governmental presence in our homes, without our consent, in what I believe to be a direct violation of the Third Amendment; if our founders were here today I believe they would agree.The obvious objection is that you have consented to bringing in the internet into your home, by taking the positive action of purchasing services to do so. You've agreed to impossible-to-read Terms of Service that may even say, "...and we'll spy on you relentlessly and sell your secrets to the government," for all you know because no one actually reads those things. On the other hand, nobody can prove it was you who clicked "OK," which makes it pretty dodgy as a contract.
Or maybe they can, since they can track your cellphone in real time to the room in which the "OK" box was clicked...
I don't know that there's a straight Third Amendment claim that can fix this, though I laud them for the attempt. But we do need walls. We need to think about just where and how to build them. The government is always more dangerous to us than our enemies are. It has already all the power over us that they only dream of winning at the conclusion of a long and painful war.
9 comments:
My wall is in my head. I know intellectually that it's dangerous to allow the government a way to pick through my communications and put together a case based on some incomprehensible thought crime I couldn't have predicted, but I can't make the danger real emotionally. I know for a fact no one can understand me, so I can't believe an agent can ever gain any important insight.
That is to say, people probably understand me all the time, but it's not real to me. Being "seen through" is something I can't grasp as a danger. It makes me politically unreliable on privacy issues: I can't get worked up until someone actively interferes in my freedom of action.
The danger isn't that they'll understand you: there's at least as great a danger in cases where they misunderstand you.
As someone who monitors at least some of your internet communications regularly -- because they are directed to me, or to a community of which I am part -- I can assure you that misunderstandings happen all the time. :)
You draw a distinction that I don't, between "not understanding" and "misunderstanding."
The reason for the distinction is that it points out a danger that isn't present in your formula.
"I know for a fact no one can understand me, so I can't believe an agent can ever gain any important insight."
Say you're right about that, and the government agent really can't understand you. But he may come to believe that he understands, and on that conviction act against you -- perhaps visibly, but perhaps behind the scenes in ways that you don't learn about. (Perhaps you suddenly get an IRS audit, for no apparent reason; or perhaps clients suddenly stop being willing to work with you, without explanation.)
Misunderstandings are at least as dangerous as genuine understanding, in terms of what kinds of problems they create.
Sure, that's why I say I understand the government can trump up crazy charges against me. But they won't have anything to do with what I think, and therefore don't impinge on my privacy. If they're used to interfere in my freedom of action, I'm as irritated about it as anyone else.
Well, that level of privacy is available even in the Gulag. At least so far; there are some technologies that are in development that claim to be able to read thoughts, and if you can read them -- thus determining the physical measures associated with them -- you can probably influence them too.
Yes--I'm not arguing that government intrusion into our communications is a good idea, only that I'm unable to rouse the proper revulsion for it in myself. I have to look at it intellectually, because the feeling it should arouse in me isn't there. It's just a personal peculiarity, quite unrealistic.
Everyone in the Tea Party has to be wondering about this issue. And in the next administration, maybe it'll be OWS that's targeted, or whatever new political movement that crops up to challenge the establishment. And that fear may well inhibit action.
If the power the NSA has hasn't already been used for domestic political purposes, it will be. We're human and that's how it goes.
There's not much dead white males can do about a technology they never even knew existed.
Americans depend too much on their Founding Fathers as the know all, see all parental guardian figure.
Time to grow up, get out the house, pack up the guns and swords, and use them on the evil. Clear it out, construct a new nation.
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