Last year, I wrote a column urging students and the public in general to pay more attention to the news surrounding the large trove of information Edward Snowden leaked to The Guardian. The leaks detailed a vast network of domestic and international spying put in place by the US government. In the year since, more and more has been revealed about what the NSA has done and yet little has changed with our legislation to limit spying on US citizens.
And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like much will change soon. Both the Senate and the House have tossed around amendments to the USA Freedom Act that would supposedly limit the NSA’s ability to collect phone data from US citizens. However, the Senate’s amendment has received mixed support from civil liberties groups. This past September, a group of signatories including Daniel Ellsberg — the whistleblower who exposed the Pentagon Papers — released a letter condemning the amendment, warning that it will cement the NSA’s ability to abuse power, not limit it.
I still feel that the Snowden leaks and NSA spying have not received the attention they deserve. We have large amounts of evidence that the US government has committed gross violations of our civil rights and yet, discussions and warnings about these violations are often still dismissed as crazy conspiracy theories. I think a big reason we have trouble getting upset about these issues is that it’s not easy to point the finger at a single culprit or outline a way to solve the problem.
An argument I often hear brought up in discussions about the NSA and domestic spying is ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear.’ Meant not as support for the NSA as much as a reason not to get upset about what they’re doing, the argument claims that the average US citizen doesn’t need to worry about the government reading their emails and listening to their phone calls because their online presence doesn’t involve things like threats to the government and plans for making bombs. “The NSA is fighting terrorism,” people tell me. “Not checking up on what porn you watch.”
This argument scares me. First and foremost, contained in the information leaked by Snowden is plenty of evidence that the spying goes beyond ‘fighting terrorism.’ In July, The Intercept, an investigative group co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, released a list of American citizens targeted by the NSA despite no evidence that they were threats to national security. Unfortunately, the only real connection between the five individuals is that they are of Muslim heritage. And in a more bizarre example of abuse of power, last summer the Snowden documents revealed ‘LOVEINT’, a series of instances where NSA employees used their access to the group’s surveillance program to gain information on love interests.
The other problem with the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is that everyone has something to hide. I don’t mean that the average US citizen has on their computer detailed plans for their involvement in ISIS. What I mean is that everyone has a right to a private life and private correspondence — especially private from the eyes of the government. We’ve all said things online or through text message — whether it be an innocent joke or an explicit picture exchanged between two consenting adults or something else — that maybe won’t make us a government target now, but with the NSA surveillance in place, who’s to say that someone in the government who disagrees with us won’t dig these things up and use them against us if we were to run for office or rise to some other position of power.
I recognize that it’s outlandish to compare what the US government and the NSA are doing to past examples of dictatorships and other governments that have committed serious human rights violations and acts of oppression. I’m not saying that it’s become the American KGB or that we’ve lost all sense of human rights. However, the problem is that this infrastructure exists at all and that it has been used against innocent US citizens even once. Maybe you don’t have anything to hide today, but what’s to say that something you say now won’t be used against you in the future if circumstances are different.
The Internet is possibly the most powerful tool created by humankind. The instantaneous access to information and communication around the globe has forever changed the way we interact with each other and the world. However, this power also means that it has unbelievable potential for abuse. Just look at places like North Korea or China where the government has severely (or entirely) restricted public access to the internet as a tool of oppression. We cannot passively accept what the NSA is doing as an inevitable reality of the internet just because we ‘have nothing to hide.’ This issue goes beyond the United States of America, too. As citizens of the world, we have to take back the Internet as a tool for information and free speech for all.
Artwork by JENA RITCHEY
