From the time Edward Snowden leaked classified information about the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance system to identify terrorist activities, there has been a debate about what the right balance should be between protecting individual privacy and safeguarding communities from terrorist attacks. Such debates are appropriate in a society where the Constitution demands the government provide both rival protections simultaneously but leaves the desired balance up to the people.
There is a body of research providing guidance about how to achieve a rational symmetry on these types of issue. I would recommend reading Human Judgment and Social Policy by Kenneth R. Hammond, professor emeritus and former director of the Center for Research on Judgment and Policy at the University of Colorado, and The Spirit of Community Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda by Amitai Etzioni, director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University.
This research shows that for society to be able to establish a rational balance between rival objectives like personal privacy and community safety, people must understand that for gains acquired in community safety, elements of individual privacy will be lost, and for gains in individual privacy, elements of community safety will be lost. Statisticians call this a zero-sum game. In the current debate, the NSA understands the need to balance both objectives, while Edward Snowden, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil liberty advocates, like Sen. Mark Udall, focus exclusively on individual privacy. In doing so, they mislead the public by implying achieving greater privacy will have no effect on community safety.
The primary concern voiced by the ACLU is that the NSA is collecting and storing huge numbers of landline, cellphone and email locations in this country and such collections violate peoples’ constitutional rights.
The NSA responds that it collects only locations and interactions, not conversations. And because the world communication system is complex, when it detects a terrorist is attempting to communicate with someone in the United States, it needs a large database of locations to search in order to find the recipient. Like the “needle in a haystack” analogy, if part of the haystack is not available for searching, the probability of finding the needle is proportionately reduced.
The NSA also explains that conversations are monitored only after a suspected link is detected and a warrant obtained, at which time the monitoring is done by the FBI, not the NSA. Finally, the validity of the privacy safeguards is demonstrated by the fact there has been no reported incident where innocent people’s conversations have been monitored.
The ACLU responds even with all the checks instituted by the NSA to prevent innocent people’s communications from being monitored, the potential for abuse is still there, which is reason enough to reduce the size or even stop compiling such a large number of locations. As a further reason, they argue that the system is useless because it has never prevented a terrorist attack. That claim is logically absurd because it implies that deterrents are useless. It’s the same as suggesting the United States unilaterally give up all its nuclear weapons because there have been no nuclear wars.
President Obama, who obviously understands that individual privacy and community safety are interlinked, last week proposed a compromise by directing communication locations should continue to be collected, but not by the NSA. Who will do the collecting was left open, although telecom companies were the obvious choice. Most important, he also directed the databases be available to the NSA for searching when NSA officials obtain a court order or in emergencies without a court order.
The proposal was rejected by most privacy advocates as not doing enough. Most proponents of the current system accepted it, albeit grudgingly, because technically, except for the management of the databases, it is not much different from the procedures the NSA now follows.
The president concluded that his approach would provide authorities with “the information they need to keep us safe while addressing the legitimate privacy concerns that have been raised.” Such a tradeoff should not be difficult for most people to accept. They give up the location of their phone numbers and email addresses to all sorts of lists all the time with the belief that being on such a list provides them with more benefits than the risks of being harassed or taken advantage of economically. In the NSA case, the risk that the government might listen to people’s conversations without their consent by being in the database is vanishingly small, and the benefits can be evaluated from studies showing that if the current system had been in place at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, the so-called “dots” not connected would have been linked with a high probability that the attacks could have been prevented.
Garth Buchanan holds a doctorate in applied science and has 35 years of experience in operations research. Reach him at gbuch@frontier.net.
