In one of the early episodes of the West Wing, President Bartlett has to choose a Supreme Court nominee. The safe choice (White, Anglo-Saxon, Centrist) is all for limiting privacy rights whereas the risky choice (Latino, EX-cop, edgy, very liberal) comes through the test both Toby and Sam have set for him. Sam makes an emotional and persuasive argument about privacy being the issue of our Internet/Cell phone/Credit card age, just like civil rights were the issue of the 1950s/60s.
I was reminded of that episode when I read William Arkin’s blog entry today, Seamless Survaillance, in which he asks some good questions:
This is the central question: Are all of these NSA ingestion and digestion programs merely more efficient efforts to apprehend criminals and terrorists in the digital age, or are they the building blocks of a new seamless surveillance culture? ….. The government’s position is that if you are “innocent,” you have nothing to hide.
Well, as the Hopeful one aka Decider told us yesterday, personal lives of Americans aren’t being trolled around by NSA. Why? Because, as Arkin said, innocence will not trigger the system and the innocent have nothing to worry about. So now here you have a new digital divide between the presumed innocent and the supposedly threatening. Do they all have racial, ethnic, geographical markers?
Here is the irony though. Democrats were berating the Hopeful One for not asking Americans to sacrifice anything in these difficult times. Hold fire, folks. He has already asked for some of your privacy rights.
Let us leave tonight’s Immigration speech for another day. Not only is it a tough issue politically, Bush for once may have some right ideas but it doesn’t matter given the complexity of this issue.
5 Comments
You know, the irony is that many managerial personnel [of business organizations] in India wish for more government involvement/scrutiny of private records of its citizens.
I live in the mortal fear of potential financial fraud being committed on my colleagues. I check logs on my company’s servers at least twice a day because they hold enough data for someone to do what I fear.
In India, if someone manages to make an unauthorized financial transaction by credit card or cheque, the victim goes through torture. S/he has to file a court case, deal with bureaucracy, pay a hefty lawyer fee and just hope that everything works out. More often than not, the victim chooses to change a bank account number/credit card and swallow the loss in order to avoid the hassle of reclamation.
Contrast the above to what happens to an US resident who experiences credit card/other financial fraud. All the victim has to do is to call the financial institution s/he deals with, and they refund the disputed amount immediately; it is then up to the the merchant/beneficiary of the transaction to prove its authenticity. This is possible not because of the generosity of American/International financial institutions, but because US law protects its residents and has dictated to American/International financial institutions to protect US residents the way the US government sees fit. It is indeed funny that India has a reputation of having “too much state intervention” to provide a free market, what is state control if it does not protect its people?!
I really do not care if a pervert sees personal information or communication, all I care about is accountability; The US government provides this, regardless of the party in government.
There is no real privacy from the government in the US, common people in large cities are taped [on an average] eight times a day. You are taped when you make a retail purchase, use an ATM or even when you use public transport. All of these records are available to the US government on [their] demand. Unless you are doing something objectionable [according to US law], I really do not see a problem with this. India offers an interesting contrast, it is easily possible to live a law abiding life in a large city (like Mumbai), pay your taxes and social dues and be totally unnoticed by the government. Living this way is not wrong, but what if you were doing something “wrong”?
Okay, I still think that I am on the topic of your topic. Indians in West Bengal and NE states exploit “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh in a way that is far more reprehensible than the way the US of A exploit the Mexicans and other South Americans. I do not want to go into the details of the abuse, but this blog’s American readers can look at labour costs for Bangladeshis working in Kolkata (it is less than $ 0.05/hour, Banglas also put up with rape and physical abuse, but what the hell).
I [being a non-US citizen/resident, and also an interested observer] cannot grasp the US idea of “illegal immigration” from the south of the US border. When the white man talks about the South Americans, all I can think about is that the white man deserves credit for the worst genocide in history and comes in pretty close for the most successful territorial occupation!
That was their land. They walked free and unfettered, they were free until you told them that they were not.
Well, you are spot on. that’s the illusion (of security and privacy) which seems to have taken hold. any breach, violation creates much anxiety. People in US take for granted the protection of the sort you describe for granted. But the value they place on the kind of privacy also has a peculiar history here. I have always considered privacy an illusion, at least the kind of privacy that is being bandied about.
Also, Indians or others have no moral high ground to claim on how we treat Bangladeshi immigrants / cheap labor.
I was not claiming moral high ground, but stating a fact.
Cheap Bangladeshi labour contributed significantly to building the nice highways in WB and the metro in Kolkata.
Actually, i was agreeing with you; the fact you stated demolishes the claim on moral high ground BJP would want to claim. We too treat outsiders (and most of the insiders too) badly. As I wrote in earlier entry on the May day rally, the question has to be about dignity.
Yo, Mr. X, here is one more piece in the WAPO by David Ignatius, if you haven’t looked at it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/16/AR2006051601369.html
The OPED is pretty good and here are the two relevant paragraphs:
“The NSA program poses the most difficult questions about privacy, intelligence and the law. The first essential task is to strip away some of the legal misinformation, starting with constitutional issues. The Supreme Court for decades has accorded a lesser privacy right to calling-record data — which the NSA likes to call “meta-data” — than to the underlying content. The court held in a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland , that “it is too much to believe” that telephone users expect the numbers they dial will be secret, when those numbers appear in bills, phone logs and other business records.
Though Congress in the 1980s legislated greater privacy rights for calling data than the court had found in the Constitution, it narrowed those rights in amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allowed FISA warrants for searching call records if the information was “relevant to an ongoing investigation” of terrorism. Details about the numbers being examined had to be provided only “if known.”"
Post a Comment