Who Cares About Surveillance?

The Washington Post reported that most Americans don't care that much about recent surveillance disclosures. Perhaps this is because there is bipartisan agreement among Congressional leaders that everything being done is kosher and necessary, and because the president has also weighed in reassuring the public that nobody is eavesdropping on their phone calls. Perhaps it is because it is hard to get worried about anything you don't notice and whose effects you can't see. Perhaps it's because we are now too distant in history from European surveillance states; the fall of the Soviet Union was a long time ago from the perspective of a college student, and Nazi German is the stuff of old movies. (Do they even read 1984 in schools any more?) There is North Korea of course, but people think of that place as so remote and isolated as to be almost a joke (unless they have Korean relatives). As danah boyd has observed (meandering thoughts on the NSA scandal), activists care, but activists are the ones most likely to commit speech and thought crimes. It seems not to be taken for granted by most Americans that whether the surveillance is unconstitutional is not a matter for consensus decision, since it involves infringement of the Fourth Amendment. As the Washington Post reports, "while it might be fine for your neighbors to let the government inspect their personal lives, it’s not okay for your neighbors to say it’s fine for officials to inspect you. 'The whole purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect the minority from the will of the majority,' [Professor Lori Andrews] says." The Washington Post and the Guardian may have muddied the waters by going to press too incautiously with reporting based only on the infamous PowerPoint presentation and on Edward Snowden's interview. The first version of the Post's reporting was walked back in significant respects with very little notice. Declan McCullagh, a respected digital-affairs reporter, has concluded that there is no evidence that the NSA has direct access to Internet service provider servers, as the Guardian and the Post declared and as Facebook and Google denied. Maybe those PowerPoint slides were the work of an overzealous marketing flak. If the newspapers that had the scoop got it wrong, it becomes easier for the public to be reassured that there is nothing creepy or improper going on.