Edward Snowden has leaked information regarding something we all suspected was happening, but that is nonetheless terrifying – the extent of the NSA and the world’s other intelligence agencies’ intrusion into the online world.
People much better-informed and more eloquent than I have written a lot about this, so I won’t go into the nuts and bolts here; I merely want to point out the not-always-obvious impact that technology can have in our lives.
The internet in particular has pushed “common-sense” laws into reductio ad absurdum territory, especially regarding privacy. For example, it’s currently OK to take pictures in public places – that makes sense, because you’re already in public where everyone can see you. But what if every private building and every car had cameras on it, scanning everyone who walks by and cataloging their movements with facial recognition technology?
Jaron Lanier mentions this scenario in his book “Who Owns the Future?” (which I mentioned in another post and just finished the other day). He calls it the “creepiness factor”, which is nicely descriptive – everything is on a kind of spectrum of creepiness, and the increasing interconnection between the physical and digital worlds has pushed a lot of what used to be “reasonable” well into the creepiness zone.
Companies like Google and Facebook use that kind of technology to put ads in front of your face, but what happens when a government agency does it? It shoots way off into the creepiness stratosphere.
I think if there’s one takeaway here, it’s that laws haven’t kept up with the pace of technological progress at all. Things like facial recognition and tracking cookies were the stuff of science fiction when most of these laws were written, and it isn’t ideal to have to wait until a global surveillance network is already in place for people to start reacting to this overreach of government power.
This isn’t so much an issue of government transparency – intelligence agencies obviously need to be able to operate secretly – but they should have very clear and very rigidly enforced limits to what they can do, how they can do it, and to whom they do it. We should never have let things get this far out of control.