As I posted last week there’s been a slight uproar about the NSA’s efforts to aggregate all the phone call data in the US.  Simply put the NSA is trying to distinguish who is calling whom and how often in an effort to track terrorists by said patterns.  I also said that I didn’t think this would be such a contentious issue if the government had been transparent or forthcoming in its efforts.

Today I read this item on Boing Boing and another aspect of this argument crept into my dim little brain.  First an excerpt:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources. “It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Here’s the question that this item caused to flicker in my head: if the government isn’t listening the contents of calls as they claim then how do they know who is making the call and who is receiving it?  If you call my house you could be talking to any one of five people who live here or any number of guests we have over.  If you call my cell phone you may not talk to me;  if the phone is lying around the house any one could pick it up and say hello.

While looking at cell phone records gives you an idea of who is probably talking to whom you just can’t know for sure unless you’re listening to the actual contents of the call.  But because our government has created an environment of guilty until proven innocent we are instictively loathe to give them even that level of access to records of our activities.

As a follow up to the NSA story the results of a survey were released showing that about two thirds of Americans had no problem with this kind of data collection if it helped fight terrorism.  I suspect that is becuase most people don’t feel they have anything to hide.  But how would they feel if they knew there was a possibility that their daughter, who was home for the summer from college, had a boyfriend living in a group home and unbeknownst to him he had a roommate who had links to a terror cell (however tangential).  The daughter’s numerous calls to a number with known terrorist connections raises a red flag and all of the sudden mom and dad have to deal with federal agents calling their employers with some very pointed questions.

I have a feeling their opinions might change.

Boing Boing has some interesting excerpts from an interview with William Gibson re. the new NSA controversy.  He points out that as a society we’ve (Americans) been assuming that the CIA et.al. has been doing this kind of stuff for years anyway, and that during the Cold War we were even comforted by the idea that they were listening anyway.  I’d argue that many people are still comforted by this idea as we fight terrorism.

Reading this caused me to look at this another way.  A few years ago I did some work in the “database marketing” field.  I was stunned at how much information companies like Acxiom are collecting about all of us every day, but it didn’t really bother me that much because the data they were collecting had mostly to do with our habits as consumers.  What we buy, where we buy it, etc.  And they sold that data to companies whose only real goal was to figure out how to get us to buy more of their stuff. They really didn’t have any motivation to use it any other way. Still, even then there were privacy advocates who were worried that the data could and would be used for more nefarious purposes.  They pointed out that if the government decided to pay for the data the companies would have an instant profit motive for releasing the data.  And then, of course, there was the problem of the companies losing the data or having it hijacked by hackers, but that’s another story.

What makes this “government spying on citizens” meme so disturbing to me is that the government has not been forthright about what they’re doing, and not just on this issue I might add, and so there is no reason to trust them when they say they’re just doing it to fight terrorism.  That’s what happens when you violate the public trust: just when you may need us to trust you most we say “f— you.” 

Ironically I think if the government had said, “Hey, without getting into the details we want you to know that this is the kind of thing we’re doing to fight terrorism.  To protect the innocent we’re cooperating with the fill-in-the-blank oversight committee to make sure that we don’t violate citizens’ rights…oh, and by the way we couldn’t use any of this information in any kind of court because it was not obtained in the proper manner and was never intended for that use anyway” then many of us would welcome what they’re doing in principle. 

But the government assumes we’re idiots, that we can’t be trusted and they know better than us what we need/want.  That’s the other irony: this administration has created more of a “nanny state” than any of its supposedly more liberal predecessors.  This from a regime that turned “liberal” into an epithet.

And we have three more years of this crap.