by Justine El-Khazen at Tablet Mag
My email was being “held in government quarantine” pending review, a letter from Yahoo! informed me. I was sitting in the computer lab in the German department at New York University. It was September of 2003. I remember because I’d just received an email about a merit scholarship for that semester. The government wants to know about my scholarship? was my first thought. My next one was: Let ‘em. What did I care if the government knew my GPA?
This is a common line of reasoning in the bulk surveillance era. The “nothing to hide” argument, which, as Edward Snowden points out, was likely the brainchild of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Americans really took to it back in 2013, when Snowden revealed the government’s mass spying programs. Unless their private photos were being looked at, nobody cared.
Fast forward 10 years, and Americans seem to have adopted the same basic attitude toward the revelation that the government is spying on millions of social media accounts. So what if the government is spying on us—how else could it protect us from Russia and domestic extremists? Defenders of the new censorship regime focused on the politics of those censored, arguing over the finer points of what counts as a legitimate extremist threat. But they’ve missed the point: The government is reading our tweets, and monitoring our activity online, regardless of our individual political persuasions.
As a former military intelligence contractor told me: The real name of the game is data fusion. The government wants to collect tens of millions of tweets and cross-reference them with geolocations and credit scores, not so that it can protect Americans from Islamic terrorism or domestic extremism, but in order to exercise power. This is nothing new: In 1971, Sam Ervin, a Democratic senator from North Carolina, held a hearing on “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights,” the last of which, Ervin warned, was being trampled by the country’s security establishment. Ervin testified that “demonstrators and rioters” in the unrest of the 1960s had been treated not “as American citizens with possibly legitimate grievances, but as ‘dissident forces’ deployed against the established order.” And given that view, Ervin concluded, “it is not surprising that Army intelligence would collect information on the political and private lives of the dissenters.” Fast forward 60 years, and the FBI is still at it: BLM and J6 protesters, members of Congress and their campaign donors have all been investigated for links to terrorism. Of course, in the meantime, the Patriot Act provided an updated legal framework for this kind of overreach, giving intelligence agencies greater latitude than ever.