The Patriot Act, Cyber-Edition

Lockheed Martin employees at work in the company's NexGen Cyber Innovation and Technology Center, which monitors internet threats, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. (photo: Eric Schulzinger/Lockheed Martin)
Lockheed Martin employees at work in the company's NexGen Cyber Innovation and Technology Center, which monitors Internet threats, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. (photo: Eric Schulzinger/Lockheed Martin)

By Zachary Katznelson, American Civil Liberties Union

Cybersecurity is the new buzzword in Washington, capturing a wide range of potential responses to internet-related threats both real and imagined. Congress is starting to play a role, considering legislation that purports to make cyberspace more secure. But many of the solutions being offered echo those of the deeply flawed Patriot Act, enacted ten years ago this month.

Just as the Patriot Act swept aside long-standing constitutional protections against government prying into private lives, current cybersecurity proposals threaten to expand the government’s ability to collect personal information – even when there is no indication that the people targeted have been involved in any wrongdoing.

Over the past decade, we have learned that such policies fail on two fronts: they are largely ineffective and they violate civil liberties.

The Patriot Act presumes that if the government could know more of what we do with our daily lives by monitoring our e-mails and phone calls, downloading our financial transactions, and tracking our locations, it could spot patterns and find terrorists. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches have mattered little as claims of national security swept such concerns aside.

That thinking has led even further, to warrantless wiretapping and government databases so massive that numbers most of us have never heard of (like yottabytes) have to be used to quantify the data taken in. But counter-terrorism officials consistently lament being swamped with reports and analyses while trying to come to grips with the astronomical amount of data our powerful computers struggle to collate and interpret. In seeking the needle of terrorism, we have built the biggest haystack in history.

As we turn to the challenge of cybersecurity, we should be careful not to repeat past mistakes.

The Obama administration’s plan again seeks to gather more and more private information about regular citizens in the hope of spotting patterns. Under this proposal, private companies would be asked to hand over increasing amounts of our personal information. Once more, information gathering would be incredibly broad, sweeping in law-abiding Americans against whom there is not even a hint of alleged wrongdoing. In the name of making us safe, we once again face the prospect of flooding our systems with excessive information, and hamstringing the officials trying to protect us.

There cannot be a meaningful debate about these policies until the public knows what the government is already doing with our private information. The government currently collects reams of data from private companies, some demanded, some handed over voluntarily. But we have no idea how much or how often, or maybe even more importantly, what is done with all these private details once they are in government hands. That is all kept secret.

As citizens, we deserve to know what the companies holding our financial details, communications records, and other personal information are doing with it – and what the government is requiring of them. For that reason, the ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about how corporations and the government already pass our private information back and forth.

To date, no government agency has revealed anything in response. Before Washington asks for even more power to sweep in data, surely it should disclose how much it takes in now. We must avoid the Patriot Act’s pitfalls: a civil-liberties-defying policy that might actually make things worse.

 

Zachary Katznelson is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. He can be reached by email at media@aclu.org.

7 thoughts on “The Patriot Act, Cyber-Edition”

  1. Brenden and Mystes – Thanks for your response. It is so true that despite occasional fears and misgivings, the act of standing up just plain feels better than not doing so, and I know when I see people putting thier names and faces on to the net, or anywhere else for that matter, with what they believe, there is a feeling of wild joy and community. Fear invites attack and courage invites more courage. What a gift to be alive now, human, free, among friends ๐Ÿ™‚

  2. KatL, you do get this, yes? that cowardice *invites* attack! The truly malicious in this world are only able to see into the mirror of their own fear. It is not courage that triggers those beings, only the golem of craving/hatred.

    In signing these documents, in holding this space, you aren’t –are not, aRe NOT– being any kind of an ‘idiot,’ – you are creating a space for courage and integrity. But follow up and follow well. Finish what you have started.

    You’ll be fine. We all will be fine. The algorithms for AI… those codes *do* exist, but unlike the mathetics for nuclear fission, they will never slip into the hands of the putative power-brokers.

    And here’s why: It doesn’t matter how fast the CPUs can run, they will never catch up to the multivalence of the human/metahuman sensorium – which is evolving in proportion to the sapient load on the planet. More sentience pushes the upper limit of awareness ever higher, and drags the bottom along with it. This is accelerating at a pace that our woefully-outdated, 19th C. mechanisms of ‘social control’ are completely at a loss to manage. Not that they won’t give it a good, last gasp. But it’s over for them, really.

    I guess I’m saying: *thank you* for showing your face. Now go look for your dancing shoes.

  3. Kat –

    The thing I see with this move is that there truly will be no effective electronic privacy any more. Once everyone is in the same boat, common folk, politicians, what have you, astrologers even, there can be no effective blackmail for whatever is to be found within the matrix. When the “goods” are instantly gettable on anyone, what good is a mere threat of exposure? This implies transparency of course, and until that happens, all bets are off. That may be the answer though, that nothing is actually hidden any more from anyone.

    That’s what’s being built of course, an electronic matrix that is a world unto itself – and bears no resemblance to the physical world whatsoever. With the perpetual acquisition and storage of all electronic knowledge, artificial constructs can’t be far behind. They will be the true aliens, unable to live as we do, and we as them.

    What happens to human interactions when we can theoretically know everything about someone without ever meeting them face to face will interesting. Will we retreat to individual pods, or will we instead have more intense personal relationships?

    I vote for intensity, not isolation.

  4. I wonder about the risks of posting on the internet – for instance, on our local Occupy Bellingham facebook page, I have been using my name and photo. We were asked to sign an agreement to act non-violently and I signed it, but then I started reading people’s posts who thought it was risky to put in identifying information.

    It does feel risky, but on the other hand, I think being willing to put my name and face on the line with what I believe is worth the risk. It seems to me that if I cower out of fear, I feed the beast in some way. On the other hand, I might be sorry some day.

    When I consider the masses of people and the masses of information, as discussed in the article, and it seems just plain paranoid to worry about it. It feels like being an accordion, if you know what I mean – the paranoia expanding out, then contracting to a sense of right size, integrity and confidence, then all of a sudden being pulled out of proportion again and into a mild sense of paranoia.

    My over-arching stance is that I would rather go down fighting than cower, but then I see that other people use pseudonyms, and I think I may be an idiot.

  5. If I could only see those screens more clearly… A lot of information there in the picture: the screens are linked not to a PC, but to a system that links to PC-like functions on the giant computer and servers in the background. Uber-geek heaven, and all for traffic analysis!

    Sad part is, that if they let a picture be taken of it, it’s not the real secret stuff. That’s not even going to be disclosed, and may be viewed only elsewhere in another facility, buried within layers of physical and electronic security.

    This issue is also why DARPA and other agencies are sponsoring artificial intelligence research: they need a faster mind in order to find the tiny needles in the humongous haystacks.

    Here’s a thought: if we all begin corresponding in 17th century English it might just confuse the hell out of things.

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