How Many Times Has the Government Spied on You Today?

The post How Many Times Has the Government Spied on You Today? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

The Snowden revelations, while dramatic, have done little to amp up public concern about personal surveillance.

After all, thanks to technology, electronic spying is cheap —  so cheap the government can’t afford not to do it.

But what is the cost to society and to freedom? In this WhoWhatWhy Podcast, Jennifer Granick, the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, talks to Jeff Schechtman about the technology that tracks and stores emails and follows personal movement, about the amassing and mining of metadata, and how all this information is used and misused by the government.

She reveals government efforts to get social-media passwords and phone PINs from foreigners entering the country, and explains the underlying reason that the US government spies on foreigners: they are spying on us.

Granick reminds us that surveillance is not just something that happens to other people, and that antiquated 20th-Century laws and post-9/11 oversight are no match for the high-tech wizardry of modern-day surveillance in the wrong hands.

Jennifer Granick is the author of American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What to Do About It (Cambridge University Press, January 2017)

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman.

There is that famous quote from Scott McNeely, the founder of Sun Microsystems that “we have no privacy. Get over it”. I think to a large extent that’s how many people think, even those concerned about it think that there’s very little in this modern era that we can do about it. The Snowden Revelations, while dramatic and captivating for a few new cycles did only a little in the long run to amp up public concern about surveillance, data collection and privacy. Why is that? As the reality in technology of modern surveillance so disconnected from antiquated 20th-century laws that there’s just no legal through line with which to address it in ways that creates a story that the public can understand. We’re going to look at that today with my guest Jennifer Granick. She is director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet in Society. She’s taught cyber law, computer crime law, Internet liability and Internet law and policy. She also served as the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California. She is the author of the new book American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care and What to do About It. Jennifer Granick, welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy.

Jennifer Granick: Thanks for having me!

Jeff Schechtman: There seems to be an interesting disconnect in this, and I want to start from that and we’ll work our way back, in that the laws governing these things are antiquated because obviously technology has far surpassed any ability to change the law and yet there doesn’t seem to be the political will and/or outrage to generate the kind of political force that would begin to change the laws to address these things.

Jennifer Granick: Yeah, I think that’s right. Some of that is because people don’t fully understand what’s different about surveillance today from kind of our traditional conception of it.

Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about that and one of the things that you write about in American Spies is that we think about surveillance, particularly electronic surveillance in kind of a mass collection sort of way. We don’t really think of it in the small, personal way that affects us.

Jennifer Granick: That’s right. I think people believe surveillance is something that happens to others, that the technology of surveillance today is such that instead of somebody trying to spy on people because they’re suspected of being in a drug cartel or because they’re foreign terrorists, there’s this broad, opportunistic, suspicionless collection that happens, which means that lots of random, innocent people’s information ends up in government databases and then that information can be searched or data mined after the fact. That means that, you know it’s not about being of interest. That’s not required to be collected on. People are collected on because they are using the Internet or because they are walking down the street and there’s a camera with facial recognition technology.

Once we understand how broad collection is, then I think people start to feel more engaged because they’ve realized: yes, my information could very well be in a database because I talk to people overseas, because I walked in front of these buildings, because I use the Internet, because I use social media.

Jeff Schechtman: Of course, the other part that grows out of that is the attitude of, I suppose a majority of people that well, I did nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide. Why should I care?

Jennifer Granick: I think a lot of people don’t understand how broad the law is, and there are a lot of things that are illegal that people have no idea that are illegal. Everybody, I think has something to hide. There are things you may not want your boss to know, there’s some things you may not want your kids to know, you may not want your mother to know, so I think everybody has something that they may want to keep private.

The ultimate thing that makes me worried about surveillance isn’t because I’m worried about myself, it’s because I’m worried about other people. The thing that makes me care is the spectre of political surveillance, where groups that are trying to make the world a better place, whatever they think that involves, are the ones who are going to be targeted.

Historically, vulnerable groups and people advocating for social change have always been the targets of surveillance. It’s not a right-left, Democrat-Republican thing. Surveillance can target gun right advocates as much as Black Lives Matter as much as Tea Party advocates. These are people who are challenging the status quo and who are seeking to change the balance of power, and so people who are in power who have access to the mechanisms of surveillance may not like that, and may be interested in spying on these people.

That’s what happened during the Civil Rights Era. We see it happening now with journalists, with Muslims, with political groups like Occupy and to me, that’s something that everybody should be worried about because democracy requires there to be this robust conversation about what our laws and our society ought to look like. If groups are squelched in that, then that’s just dangerous for everyone.

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