I’ve always understood our democratic system of governance as a trade off. For example, we pay taxes to the government but in exchange we expect protection from external threats. This perspective is how I attempt to validate the NSA’s snooping habits. Tuesday’s in-class questions/fishbowl exercise had me wondering what such a trade off would look like in this current situation. Maybe its because my emails, facebook posts and tweets are so mundane and boring that I really don’t care if the government sees them, but if I choose to accept that I’m possibly being surveilled then I absolutely expect something in return. I expect to feel completely safe wherever I go, be it through airports or Times Square, and anything less than a guarantee of my safety is unacceptable. I think this would possibly be the only thing worth an invasion of my privacy because its hard to object to the goal of national security.
Even following this logic, sometimes I’m still trying to convince myself that I could live with this deal. In class on Tuesday, Richard raised the point about third party contractors having access to people’s data and using that privilege to creep on their exes. This bothers me more than the NSA simply collecting a database of my phone calls or texts or tweets or whatever, and makes me reconsider my logic. I would like to assume that I could trust the government to prevent this, but I’m not sure that I can make that assumption. This abuse of privilege worries me more than the actual collection of my data.
As a final point, after reading The Guardian article and watching so many talking heads passionately discuss this issue, all I could think about was how lucky I am to be a citizen of a country where this discussion is possible. So many people have completely different opinions about the extent of the government’s reach, but others aren’t lucky enough to have even that option. I spent my semester abroad in Shanghai, and had a similar situation happened in China nobody would be talking about reining in the government’s snooping programs or establishing new oversight because they don’t have power to affect change in their government. Consent of the governed is not a reality in China. If the PLA was conducting the same kinds of data collection and analysis, which they likely are, the Chinese would have no way of protesting it. In my opinion, not being able to act on the knowledge of governmental spying would be a worse scenario than the one we find ourselves in today.