David Lacey has written a thoughtful post at Computer Weekly entitled Security versus privacy - a difficult and uncomfortable balance. I have not bothered to comment to any great extent about the NSA activies and Snowden because, as Lacey so aptly points out, they've "revealed nothing surprising to the security professional, generated little visible citizen reaction and presented no new issues in ethics or policy."
Like David Lacey, I am "neither an advocate nor a critic of covert eavesdropping". I do believe in national security. I am grateful that NSA and other surveillance programs are now subject to public scrutiny. But I also think the motives and actions of whistleblowers should be scrutinized. I don't think that acts of disclosure or oath breaking without inspection make a party a hero or trustworthy, nor do I think they instantly exonerate a party from prosecution for (criminal) wrongdoing. So it's not surprising that I found myself agreeing with much of what David Lacey wrote.
In the post, David discusses the ethics of eavesdropping, covert eavesdropping, the importance - and difficulty - of both balancing the needs for national security and civil liberties:
"Civil liberties are important: the rights of individuals to be free from government interference, to be free to associate, to speak freely, and to maintain privacy are fundamental liberties, enshrined in constitutions, charters, covenants and bills of rights going back eight centuries. But national security is also important: the need to identify and combat criminal, espionage or terrorist threats. A balance has to be struck. In practice this will depend on which of these conflicting issues is the most burning one of the moment."
While I agree that this is a spot on observation, I believe that there are two issues conflated here: dealing with the burning issue in the heat of moment, and dealing with the enduring aftermath of the decisions made. What we see too often when decisions are made in the name of national security is not a short term fix but a lasting concession of privacy or other constitutional rights.
The NSA activities (and generally, many activities or legislation in the Post Patriot Act era) aren't a temporary declaration of a curfew but a long term adoption of surveillance under a debatable warrant process with no transparency regarding retention, remanence, scope, or purpose. In cases like this, I can't find any evidence that balance was sought or struck: it's a tug of war where secrecy and influence bias the outcome.
"An important and largely overlooked need is to educate and consult the public before laws and policies are developed."
This need is woefully unfulfilled. And while I agree that you can educate and that, as you say, "citizen opinions change over time and across generations", it's hard to dispute that secrecy plays to the strength of those who exploit the burning issue or play to the fears or ignorance of the population, and thus the "long slow learn" necessary to balance security and privacy will be difficult to realize.
Privacy has and continues to lose, as you predicted. I have little faith that politicians or public sector leaders will adopt responsible practices and behaviors unless citizens begin to insist that privacy be as prominent a campaign issue as healthcare, abortion, education or gun control.
I do, however, believe that privacy advocate participation in multi-stakeholder Internet governance models can increase the whistleblower capacity by, as you suggest, making use of security technologies to detect and responsibly report rights-infringing behavior. We should not wait for a Snowden to act when we can use social media responsibly to amplify activism. We should not focus intently on NSA alone after a Snowden calls attention to this nation's surveillance activities but instead question how globally widespread surveillance activities are and how interconnected, and then report on these responsibly. Only by raising concerns for privacy to the level where citizens value privacy as much as security can we begin a meaningful dialog about balance between security and privacy.
Thank you, David, for trying to force us to look at security and privacy not as a burning issue, but as a nagging issue that needs reasoned attention. I hope you find my comments equally helpful.
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