Matt Watson is the opinion editor at The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].For much of the current presidential administration’s history, telecommunications eavesdropping has become a central issue. In a time of war, it is sometimes necessary to give up certain rights. This is understandable, although I would disagree that we are in a real war in the first place.
Added to the argument that our government has a right to eavesdrop on whomever it wants is an assertion by one high-ranking intelligence official that the very definition of privacy should be changed in this era of digital communication.
According to an Associated Press report, Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, proposes that privacy, legally speaking, should no longer equate to anonymity, but instead to the government’s entitlement to access phone and e-mail conversations in order to protect people.
In language, the meaning of words change, and I have found that it is often politicians who try to change them. For instance, former president Bill Clinton even doubted the definition of is during his impeachment.
However, the adulteration of the word privacy is a lot worse in its consequences than an entertaining presidential sex scandal. It involves hundreds of millions of people.
Kerr says anonymity can no longer be maintained in today’s world and that businesses should be able to share more information with the government to ensure the protection from the misuse of citizens’ privacy.
But when anonymity is subtracted from the picture, and government control of information is added, privacy is not there anymore. In the guise of trying to find a new definition of privacy, Kerr is actually arguing for people to ignore the right to privacy altogether.
He takes this position during a time in which Congress is re-redefining the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to grant telecommunications companies immunity from lawsuits for sharing e-mail messages and phone calls with the government without a court order.
The act was first redefined last year, when Congress changed it to allow warrantless government eavesdropping on any phone calls believed to involve one party located outside of the United States.
Kerr claims that since American citizens already give up much of their privacy through services such as Facebook and MySpace, it should not come as a surprise that the government needs to take broader liberties with people’s private lives.
This is illogical. It is true that individuals have a more public presence due to the Internet, but it doesn’t give government the right to eavesdrop on them.
I have a Facebook account and a blog, but when I call someone, I expect my conversation to be private. It’s a very simple concept.
“Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs,” Kerr said.
He hit the nail on the head. People choose what information they distribute to others. They choose the information they provide to the public and the information they want to keep private. The fact that so many people utilize communications technology doesn’t mean they no longer care about their privacy.
Kerr also asserts that it makes no sense for citizens to trust a green card holder at an Internet service provider and not also the government. However, it is not up to the government to decide who an individual should trust with certain information.
To quell our fears of an overreaching government presence, Kerr assures us that government employees suffer major consequences for misusing private information.
This kind of thinking is characteristic of intrusive government. It doesn’t matter how much the government claims it will follow self-imposed standards. It has no right to monitor our daily communications.
Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer who is suing 40 companies for illegally sharing information with the government, put it well. “It’s just another ‘Trust us, we’re the government,'” he said.
He couldn’t be more right.