[Vision2020] Your Smartphone Is Watching You

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 8, 2013
Your Smartphone Is Watching You By ROSS DOUTHAT

ON Thursday, just after reports broke that the National Security Agency had
been helping itself to data from just about every major American Internet
company, an enterprising Twitter user <https://twitter.com/selfagency> set
up an account called “Nothing to Hide <https://twitter.com/_nothingtohide>,”
which reproduced tweets from people expressing blithe unconcern about their
government’s potential access to their e-mails, phone records, video chats,
you name it.

“If it can save people from another 9/11 like attack, go for it,” one
declared <https://twitter.com/DrPaula_9/status/343008604636463106>. “My
emails/phone calls are not that exciting anyway ...”

Another tweeted <https://twitter.com/KJLappy/status/343083906062495744>:
“...this sort of thing was bound to happen. We live in the information age.
Besides, I have nothing to hide.”

And another <https://twitter.com/SwagKingKhan/status/343070264352980992>:
“If you share your whole life on social media who cares if the government
takes a peek?!?”

These citizens have a somewhat shaky grasp of how civil liberties are
supposed to work. But they understand the essential nature of life on the
Internet pretty well. The motto “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” — or,
alternatively, “abandon all privacy, ye who enter here” — might as well be
stamped on every smartphone and emblazoned on every social media log-in
page. As the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote recently, it isn’t that
the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state; it’s that the
Internet, in effect, *is *a surveillance state.

Anxiety over this possibility has been laced into online experience since
the beginning. (Witness Clinton-era netsploitation movies like “Enemy of
the State.”) But in the early days of the dot-com era, what people found
most striking about online life was how anonymous it seemed — all those
chat rooms and comment sections, aliases and handles and screen names. A
famous New Yorker cartoon depicted two canines contemplating a computer, as
one promised the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

This ideal of anonymity still persists in some Internet communities. But in
many ways, the online world has turned out to be less private than the
realm of flesh and blood. In part, that’s because most Internet users don’t
want to cloak themselves in pseudonyms. Instead, they communicate in online
spaces roughly the way they would in a room full of their closest friends,
and use texts and e-mails the way they would once have used a letter or a
phone call. Which means, inevitably, that they are much more exposed — to
strangers and enemies, ex-lovers and ex-friends — than they would have been
before their social lives migrated online.

It is at least possible to participate in online culture while limiting
this horizontal, peer-to-peer exposure. But it is practically impossible to
protect your privacy vertically — from the service providers and social
media networks and now security agencies that have access to your every
click and text and e-mail. Even the powerful can’t cover their tracks, as
David Petraeus discovered. In the surveillance state, everybody knows
you’re a dog.

And every looming technological breakthrough, from Google Glass to
driverless cars, promises to make our every move and download a little
easier to track. Already, Silicon Valley big shots tend to talk about
privacy in roughly the same paternalist language favored by government
spokesmen. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,”
Google’s Eric Schmidt told an interviewer in 2009, “maybe you shouldn’t be
doing it in the first place.”

The problem is that we have only one major point of reference when we
debate what these trends might mean: the 20th-century totalitarian police
state, whose every intrusion on privacy was in the service of tyrannical
one-party rule. That model is useful for teasing out how authoritarian
regimes will try to harness the Internet’s surveillance capabilities, but
America isn’t about to turn into East Germany with Facebook pages.

For us, the age of surveillance is more likely to drift toward what Alexis
de Tocqueville described as “soft despotism” or what the Forbes columnist
James Poulos has dubbed “the pink police state.” Our government will enjoy
extraordinary, potentially tyrannical powers, but most citizens will be
monitored without feeling persecuted or coerced.

So instead of a climate of pervasive fear, there will be a chilling effect
at the margins of political discourse, mostly affecting groups and opinions
considered disreputable already. Instead of a top-down program of political
repression, there will be a more haphazard pattern of politically
motivated, Big Data-enabled abuses. (Think of the recent I.R.S. scandals,
but with damaging personal information being leaked instead of donor
lists.)

In this atmosphere, radicalism and protest will seem riskier, paranoia will
be more reasonable, and conspiracy theories will proliferate. But because
genuinely dangerous people will often be pre-empted or more swiftly caught,
the privacy-for-security swap will seem like a reasonable
trade-off<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/many-americans-appear-resigned-to-surveillance.html>to
many Americans — especially when there is no obvious alternative short
of disconnecting from the Internet entirely.

Welcome to the future. Just make sure you don’t have anything to hide.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/DouthatNYT.

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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