“I have nothing to hide!” is irrelevant.
Privacy isn’t about having nothing to hide! Surveillance grants the government a great deal of power to make decisions about you, and because the surveillance is secret, you get no say in the decisions. (Please read the article, or the original paper; I cannot summarize it in a single bullet point.)
We should all have something to hide. The civil rights movement, interracial marriage, and gay marriage would never have been allowed if nobody had anything to hide. Free speech is essential to the exchange of ideas in democracy, but so is the ability to try new and socially-unacceptable things.
You do have something to hide. The United States Code is so vast and complicated that you probably commit several felonies a day. (Please don’t use the inevitable argument “If you have nothing to hide, take off your clothes” or similar arguments. The government isn’t proposing to watch you in the shower. Yet.)
If the government erroneously believes you do have nothing to hide, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. The evidence is secret and likely will never be presented to you.
If the government chooses to use its surveillance against you, it can pick and choose which parts to present in court. Because the rest is classified, you do not have the right to use it to try to exonerate yourself.
Even if the government does not attempt to attack you using surveillance data, any prosecution (or illegal abuses; see below) it takes against other people will make you reluctant to use your First Amendment rights to free speech. “Better not say anything, or I might end up like that guy.”
Oversight-free surveillance isn’t necessary for national security.
The problem isn’t surveillance — it’s surveillance without adequate oversight and targeting. National security could be preserved by a program which also respects our civil rights. The Fourth Amendment does not ban surveillance. It bans surveillance without judicial oversight and clear limits. An order to collect all phone records clearly violates this.
Terrorism isn’t as vast a threat as it’s made out to be. You’re just as likely to be killed by a deer as by Al-Qaeda. Food poisoning, drunk driving and obesity kill more people each year, but we’re willing to cede our liberty to fight terrorism and not to fight Big Gulps?
Any large data-mining program is statistically bound to be overwhelmed by false positives which consume government time and resources and mean most people marked as “probably a terrorist” and put under more extensive surveillance will likely be innocent.
Is there really evidence that this surveillance preserves our national security? So far, there is some doubt that the administration’s examples of foiled terrorist plots were actually foiled by the NSA’s surveillance. (Wyden and Udall agree.)
The NSA could save more lives by using pervasive surveillance to mail tickets to people who text and drive.
Metadata invades your privacy.
Metadata is probably more invasive than most searches that require a warrant. You could not obtain most of this information by strip-searching me:
From your choice of friends, I can determine your sexual orientation.
Your cell phone records reveal your place of work, the popular events you have attended (including political events and protests), your mode of transportation, and presumably your favorite restaurants and spots for romantic flings.
Your cell phone location records are unique, and four data points can be used to uniquely identify you. Switching cell phones will not save you — the new phone will show the same pattern of movement, and can be linked to you.
Your credit card purchase history (which is also collected by the NSA) can be mined to reveal all sorts of details about you, such as whether you are pregnant.
Targeting people based on metadata, such as who they call and spend time with, is targeting based off of their First Amendment right to freely assemble and associate.
Revealing surveillance programs doesn’t harm national security.
Oh no, now the terrorists won’t use phones or the Internet! Perhaps we can’t intercept messages sent by carrier pigeon, but by forcing them to switch to less efficient means of communication, we have already disrupted their plans.
No terrorist will realize “the government is on to us!” after reading that the government is watching everyone. It’s equivalent to thinking the government is watching no one.
The continued secrecy of programs which violate our rights harms our security — security from the abuses of our government. Consider the case of Joseph Nacchio.
The government has a history of abusing surveillance.
HTLINGUAL was a CIA project to illegally read mail sent to the Soviet Union and China from 1952-1973.
COINTELPRO was the FBI’s effort to put political advocacy groups, like the NAACP, Martin Luther King, various women’s rights groups, and anti-Vietnam War groups, under surveillance so they could be disrupted or stopped. Hoover ordered the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the groups. The FBI attempted to blackmail and discredit MLK. Several people were killed by the FBI and police agencies.
See also Operation CHAOS.
Legal and judicial oversight did not stop the NSA’s earlier warrantless wiretapping program, which continued under executive order until exposed.
