I don’t think they’re out to get us – those 95% of us who are mildly dissatisfied with the way things are but not passionate enough to do anything more than complain about it on random internet forums. I do think they are watching us, all of us, pretty much all the time. Information capture and storage is cheap.
The danger is not that random US citizens are disappearing because of their Google searches right now. It’s that someday the information may fall into the wrong hands, or they’ll be a change in the political climate, and suddenly you can easily identify and detain a bunch of Muslims/communists/environmentalists/Japanese/blacks/Tea Partiers and produce trumped-up evidence against them using an angry phrase they muttered as teenagers on Facebook, and there’ll be no oversight against that because the President is a lame duck/Congress is apathetic or in on it/the Fourth Estate is dead/the Supreme Court will issue angry but unenforceable decrees, etc. It shifts the balance of power away from a purposely-divided government, whose separation of powers was expressly meant as a check against thoughtless unilateral action, and gives it to a shady, secret part of the Executive that few elected officials and no regular citizens are moderating. That’s not really democratic. And it’s not really safe.
Today it is ostensibly used to protect against terrorism, which is currently defined as being a violent Muslim-looking man. Yesterday it was the communists and the blacks, tomorrow it could be the animal rights folks, the anti-capitalists, anti-fracking groups, or anybody who wants encrypted online communications. Governmental action against dissident groups isn’t exactly unheard of in our history. It could be as inconvenient as being put on a No Fly List for which you have little to no recourse against, or it could be exile-by-propaganda, or it could be much, much worse if the political climate should become more dangerous.
Power unchecked is rarely used for good for long, and if a group of people decide they don’t like you and can use every mistake you’ve ever made against you in the court of public opinion and you know nothing about them to defend yourself with, what exactly are you going to do? We know how Assange and Snowden answered that – and in their case they at least had substantial collateral to fight back with.
How difficult would it be to discredit tomorrow’s whistleblower who might’ve mumbled a few seemingly un-American phrases earlier in her youth? A few choice tweets, taken out of context…
If the next terrorist attack claims 300,000 instead of 3,000, how many American freedoms do you think will still remain? How much of the information they have on you do you think they’ll use to find the perpetrators, and failing that, the scapegoats? We took down two countries and killed thousands in our last search. How safe will you be if you remotely resemble one of the attackers, if you visited some of the same websites, if you perhaps even share some of their ideology? Between profiling and entrapment, guilt-by-association is a very real thing even today. And this is when things are relatively good for most US citizens. When the next big attack comes, how much do you think people will value your freedom versus their safety – especially if you’re an easily-otherized minority group?
Not every person unhappy with the US is going to express their discontent through violent public action, broadcasting their guilt to a public who is then going to be OK with their assassination.
Would you’ve supported an impromptu execution of John Walker Lindh too?
What about Guantanamo Bay prisoners?
They’re just murderous criminals who deserve to die, right? But what if their accusers fuck up? Due process isn’t there to be deliberately inefficient, but to help catch mistakes that decision-makers inevitably make. In the case of these terrorists, rarely do they have lawyers good enough to stand up to the resources of the US Government. It is convenient for Obama that he was obviously Muslim and obviously anti-American. Not every dissident is going to be that way, but next time they can say “Oh, well, we did it to al’Awlaki and nobody really cared aside from the ACLU… why don’t we try it again with this other guy? Just take him out.”
Hey, me too. I want to see it serve all its citizens and their differing views, not act as the security arm of its elite.
They don’t have to examine all of it in real-time. They can log it and look into it later, if you become suspicious. Let’s hope the definition of “suspicious” doesn’t expand too much.
