Matt Mantica | Defriending the government

Inflam-Matt-ory | Why you should care that the NSA is spying on you and what to do about it

By Matt Mantica 06/12/13 5:35pm

Privacy is a constitutionally guaranteed right.

Since the Bill of Rights was ratified more than 200 years ago, the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution has upheld right of Americans to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment has also been an assurance of a U.S. citizen’s right to privacy. The U.S. judicial system has provided the basis for this guarantee in a number of cases, saying that when it comes to electronic communications, the government cannot view a person’s information without either the individual’s permission or a warrant.

It would seem, then, that NSA surveillance revealed last week by Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and formerly contracted analyst for the NSA, violates the rights ensured by the Fourth Amendment. Detailed in the Guardian and the Washington Post, the NSA’s actions included the collection and storage of records of cell phone calls and information stored on the servers of nine U.S. internet companies including Google and Facebook.

In short, in the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. government has violated the privacy of millions of Americans, thus failing to meet the terms of the Constitution.

Despite these troubling conflicts with the Fourth Amendment, the government has the legal support of the PATRIOT Act, passed to decrease barriers to intelligence gathering after 9/11.

Also, as President Obama said in response to Snowden’s leaks, “It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” The accepted truth of post 9/11 America seems to be that we as a society must give some rights in exchange for a sense of security.

It has become such common knowledge that the American government spies on its citizens that no one seems to be particularly surprised about these recent “revelations.” Twitter even took to making fun of the leaks last week, starting the trending topic #NSACalledToTellMe in mockery of what users saw as frivolous intrusions on what they described as uninteresting daily lives.

The consensus seems to be that if you’ve got nothing to hide, what is there to worry about?

The government’s intelligence on most citizens seems pretty useless at the moment. It might even look as if all that information will remain entirely useless for awhile. Plus, the government claims that it can’t even get at your data without a secret court’s approval.

But what if that all changes? What about 10, 20 years in the future?

What if Occupy Wall Street or some similar protest starts up and you decide to join? What if the United States government doesn’t take too kindly to your involvement and the influential position you end up earning within this movement?

Suddenly, the government can start digging into you, a previously private citizen. Because they’ve been mining your data for decades, they have reams of information on you — your phone records, Facebook and Skype conversations, possibly sensitive information on your friends and family. You’re not sitting too comfortably anymore. Now you’re scared and you’re in trouble — you’re at the mercy of the most powerful country on Earth.

Maybe not all of us will find ourselves in this scenario, and it sounds highly unlikely given the current state of the country, but it’s not an unrealistic possibility for some. No matter what the present looks like, history tells us that the future United States will never again look or feel like it does now.

A rising surveillance state and an already stark decline in privacy points to a future where hardly anything one says or does can be private for long from the extensive gaze of the United States government.

Unless we do something about it.

An average citizen doing anything democratically productive does seem extremely difficult these days, I’ll give you that. Massive lobbies, special interests, deep pockets and countless other obstacles exist to having one’s voice heard.

I’m going to go ahead and be cliche anyway, however, and say that the future, without a doubt, is ours. We are going to live in it and we are going to lead it. So we must start shaping it now.

We must be active citizens within our democracy. We must petition our Congress. We must use our vote to influence electoral outcomes. We must use our knowledge and come up with new solutions to these problems.

We must also be responsible consumers. Here, perhaps, is where our greatest power lies. Instead of supporting companies that fail to ensure their consumers’ privacy, we can throw our considerable weight behind those that support and defend to their final breaths an individual’s right to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their online endeavors.

Even if this means abandoning Gmail for an email provider you’ve never heard of or finding ways to communicate with your friends other than Facebook, we need to make it clear to companies that we value our privacy from our government. Maybe this can send a message to companies — and our government — that we are serious about privacy being one of the major constitutional issues of our generation.

Whatever the solution is, unless we get serious about finding and implementing one, things are bound to get worse.

I’m scared about what worse looks like. You should be too.

Matt Mantica is a rising College sophomore from Okemos, Mich. His email address is mantica@sas.upenn.edu. “Inflam-Matt-ory” runs biweekly during the summer.

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