Americans starting to realize their paranoid fantasies about government surveillance have come true -
For more than a decade now, Americans have made peace with the uneasy knowledge that someone — government, business or both — might be watching.
We knew that the technology was there. We knew that the law might allow it. As we stood under a security camera at a street corner, connected with friends online or talked on a smart phone equipped with GPS, we knew, too, it was conceivable that we might be monitored.
Now, though, paranoid fantasies have come face to face with modern reality: The government IS collecting our phone records. The technological marvels of our age have opened the door to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans’ calls.
Torn between our desires for privacy and protection, we’re now forced to decide what we really want.
“We are living in an age of surveillance,” said Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University’s School of Law in St. Louis who studies privacy law and civil liberties. “There’s much more watching and much more monitoring, and I think we have a series of important choices to make as a society — about how much watching we want.”
But the only way to make those choices meaningful, he and others said, is to lift the secrecy shrouding the watchers.
“I don’t think that people routinely accept the idea that government should be able to do what it wants to do,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s not just about privacy. It’s about responsibility … and you only get to evaluate that when government is more public about its conduct.”
The NSA, officials acknowledged this week, has been collecting phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. phone customers. In another program, it collects audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of the nine major Internet providers, including Microsoft, Google, Apple and Yahoo.
In interviews across the country in recent days, Americans said they were startled by the NSA’s actions. Abraham Ismail, a 25-year-old software designer taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi outside a Starbucks in Raleigh, N.C., said in retrospect, fears had prompted Americans to give up too much privacy.
“It shouldn’t be so just effortless,” he said, snapping his fingers for emphasis, “to pull people’s information and get court orders to be able to database every single call, email. I mean, it’s crazy.”
The clash between security and privacy is far from new. In 1878, it played out in a court battle over whether government officials could open letters sent through the mail. In 1967, lines were drawn over government wiretapping.
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