Privacy? Security? What do we want?

NEW YORK – For more than a decade now, Americans have made peace with the uneasy knowledge that someone – government, business or both – might be watching.

We knew that the technology was there. We knew that the law might allow it. As we stood under a security camera at a street corner, connected with friends online or talked on a smartphone equipped with GPS, we knew, too, it was conceivable that we might be monitored.Now, though, paranoid fantasies have come face to face with modern reality: The government is collecting our phone records. The technological marvels of our age have opened the door to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans’ calls.Torn between our desires for privacy and protection, we’re now forced to decide what we really want.

“We are living in an age of surveillance,” said Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University’s School of Law in St. Louis who studies privacy law and civil liberties. “There’s much more watching and much more monitoring, and I think we have a series of important choices to make as a society – about how much watching we want.”

But the only way to make those choices meaningful, he and others said, is to lift the secrecy shrouding the watchers.“I don’t think that people routinely accept the idea that government should be able to do what it wants to do,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s not just about privacy. It’s about responsibility ... and you only get to evaluate that when government is more public about its conduct.”The NSA, officials acknowledged last week, has been collecting phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. phone customers. In another program, it collects audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of the nine major Internet providers, including Microsoft, Google, Apple and Yahoo.

In interviews across the country in recent days, Americans said they were startled by the NSA’s actions. Abraham Ismail, a 25-year-old software designer taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi outside a Starbucks in Raleigh, N.C., said in retrospect, fears had prompted Americans to give up too much privacy.

“It shouldn’t be so just effortless,” he said, snapping his fingers for emphasis, “to pull people’s information and get court orders to be able to database every single call, email. I mean, it’s crazy.”

The clash between security and privacy is far from new. In 1878, it played out in a court battle over whether government officials could open letters sent through the mail. In 1967, lines were drawn over wiretapping.

Government used surveillance to ferret out Communists during the 1950s and to spy on Martin Luther King and other civil-rights leaders during the 1960s. But in earlier times, courts, lawmakers and the public eventually demanded curbs on such watching. Those efforts didn’t stop improper government monitoring, but they restrained it, said Christian Parenti, author of The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror.The difference now, he and other experts say, is that advances in personal technology and the public’s broad tolerance of monitoring because of shifting attitudes about terrorism and online privacy have given government and private companies significantly more power to monitor individual behavior.The tolerance of government monitoring stems in large part from the wave of fear that swept the country after the 2011 attacks, when Americans granted officials broad new powers under the PATRIOT Act. But those attitudes are nuanced and shifting.

In a 2011 poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 54 percent of those surveyed felt protecting citizens’ rights and freedoms should be a higher priority for the government than keeping people safe from terrorists. At the same time, 64 percent said it was sometimes necessary to sacrifice some rights and freedoms to fight terrorism.

“Whenever something like 9/11 happens, it does tend to cause people to change their minds,” Richards said. “But I think what’s interesting is it has to be a long-term conversation. We can’t, whenever we’re scared, change the rules forever.”

But up until now, there’s been only limited debate about where and how to redraw the lines on surveillance. At the same time, explosive growth in social networking, online commerce, smart-phone technology, and data harvesting for targeted marketing have introduced many Americans to all sorts of rich new experiences and conveniences. People have become enamored with the newest technology and media without giving hard thought to the risks or tradeoffs, experts say.

“This ... has really dulled our sense of what privacy is, why it’s important,” Parenti said. “The fact of the matter is that millions of people are actively participating in keeping dossiers on themselves.”

It can, at first glance, seem a leap to draw a line between the way we share our private lives on Facebook or our search habits with Google and concerns about government surveillance. But surrendering privacy, whether to business or government, fundamentally shifts the balance of power from the watched to the watchers, experts say.

Americans may have largely accepted the idea of sharing personal information with businesses or in open forums as the necessary tradeoff for the use of new technologies. But they have done so without stopping to consider what those businesses are doing with it or how police or security officials might tap into it.

“We’ve allowed surveillance of all kinds to be normalized, domesticated, such that we frequently fail to tell the difference between harmful and helpful surveillance,” said David Lyon, director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “And we assume all too easily that if it’s high tech, it’s better.”

In interviews in recent days, many people described a growing sense of unease about the trade-offs between privacy, technology and the desire for safety.

In Chicago, Joey Leonard, a clerk at the Board of Trade, sat outside at lunch hour checking apps on his smart phone and ruminated about the government’s actions. Leonard, a recent college graduate, noted that he was just 11 at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He approved of the heightened security measures to prevent a recurrence. But he said it has also becomes clear that terrorists will act even if the government is watching, raising questions about the tradeoffs.

“Society is changing and technology is changing. I understand there are threats but I do think this is a little too much,” Leonard said. “The government is trying to control everything. I feel like I’m being watched 24/7. ... It’s like they’re trying to get their fingers in every aspect of your life and I don’t think it’s helping.”

In Salt Lake City, truck driver Elijah Stefoglo hadn’t heard about the NSA’s program, but said everyday interactions with technology give him plenty to consider. Stefoglo, who lives in Minneapolis, pointed out that most newer rigs come equipped with GPS tracking and even camera systems, technology he worries could be abused. At the same time, he noted, many states are fitting driver’s licenses with computer chips to track and store data, posing yet another threat to privacy.

Expectations of privacy have slowly evolved, and younger people are growing up with a different standard, he said.

“They’re trying to put it in their heads that it’s normal. You have to do this. This is for your security. If you do this, you’re going to be safer,” he said. “In what way? Criminals are still going to do whatever they want.”

Salt Lake City resident Deborah Harrison, who is 57 and manages clinical trials at the University of Utah, recalled the uncertain days after 9/11 and said, while she was shocked by the government’s efforts, she understood them. What concerns her more, she said, is whether private companies are monitoring her behavior.

“They can track all your preferences and who knows who sells what to whom. That disturbs me actually more, than I guess the purpose of using it for national security,” she said.

And in Sacramento, Calif., Amos Gbeintor, an information analyst originally from Liberia, spoke of his frustrations with an increasing web of surveillance. He recalled a recent trip to New York City, where security cameras hovered over numerous street corners. Employers put video cameras in the workplace without telling employees. It’s difficult anymore, he said, to find a private moment in life. The reports of NSA surveillance leave him disappointed in the Obama administration and, so far, in Americans’ willingness to surrender their right to privacy.

“The younger generations are so used to putting everything about themselves out there that maybe they don’t realize they’re selling themselves out. I don’t know whether they are desensitized to a loss of privacy, but they sure are reluctant about reacting,” he said. But, maybe, this will wake people up, he said.

The revelations about the NSA’s surveillance could indeed be a turning point in driving debate, Lyon said. But technology is so pervasive and those doing the surveillance so reluctant to share what they do, that the questions will take time to answer.

Richards, the Washington University professor, was reminded of a phone conversation a few years ago to a cousin in Britain who asked for his views on U.S. politics. Just as he was about to reply, Richards said, he took stock of the situation. A phone call across borders. A foreigner on one end of the line. Criticism of elected leaders. It seemed just the kind of conversation that might be picked up by a government computer. But there was no way to know – and so Richards said he decided he had no choice but to keep his mouth shut.

“It’s a symptom of the times we’re living in and the choices we’re going to have to make ... one way or the other,” he said. “We don’t accept total surveillance in the name of crime prevention and I think people are coming to reject total surveillance in the name of terrorism prevention.”

“But it’s hard to reject surveillance if you don’t know it’s there.”

Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., Sharon Cohen in Chicago, Tracie Cone in Sacramento, Calif., and Michelle Price in Salt Lake City, Utah contributed to this story. By LARA JAKES and JIM KUHNHENN

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Eager to quell a domestic furor over U.S. spying, the nation’s top intelligence official said Saturday that a previously undisclosed program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a U.S. citizen. He decried the revelation of that and another intelligence-gathering program as reckless.

For the second time in three days, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the rare step of declassifying some details of an intelligence program to respond to media reports about counterterrorism techniques employed by the government.

“Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection,” he said in a statement.

Clapper said the data collection under the program, first unveiled by the newspapers The Washington Post and The Guardian, was with the approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court and with the knowledge of Internet service providers. He emphasized that the government does not act unilaterally to obtain that data from the servers of those providers.

Clapper’s reaction came a day after President Barack Obama defended the counterterrorism methods and said Americans need to “make some choices” in balancing privacy and security. But the president’s response and Clapper’s unusual public stance underscore the nerve touched by the disclosures and the sensitivity of the Obama administration to any suggestion that it is trampling on the civil liberties of Americans.

Late Thursday, Clapper declassified some details of a phone records collection program employed by the National Security Agency that aims to obtain from phone companies on an “ongoing, daily basis” the records of its customers’ calls. Clapper said that under that court-supervised program, only a small fraction of the records collected ever get examined because most are unrelated to any inquiries into terrorism activities.

His statement and declassification Saturday addressed the Internet scouring program, code-named PRISM, that allowed the NSA and FBI to tap directly into the servers of major U.S. Internet companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL. Like the phone-records program, PRISM was approved by a judge in a secret court order. Unlike that program, however, PRISM allowed the government to seize actual conversations: emails, video chats, instant messages and more.

Clapper said the program, authorized in the USA Patriot Act, has been in place since 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush administration, and “has proven vital to keeping the nation and our allies safe.

“It continues to be one of our most important tools for the protection of the nation’s security,” he said.

Among the previously classified information about the Internet data collection that Clapper revealed:

–It is an internal government computer system that allows the government to collect foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.

–The government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers. It requires approval from a FISA Court judge and is conducted with the knowledge of the provider and service providers supply information when they are legally required to do so.

–The program seeks foreign intelligence information concerning foreign targets located outside the United States under court.

–The government cannot target anyone under the program unless there is an “appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose” for the acquisition. Those purposes include prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities or nuclear proliferation. The foreign target must be reasonably believed to be outside the United States. It cannot intentionally target any U.S. citizen or any person known to be in the U.S.

–The dissemination of information “incidentally intercepted” about a U.S. person is prohibited unless it is “necessary to understand foreign intelligence or assess its importance, is evidence of a crime, or indicates a threat of death or serious bodily harm.

The Post and the Guardian cited confidential slides and other documents about PRISM for their reports. They named Google, Facebook, Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc. and Paltalk as companies whose data has been obtained.

All the companies have issued statements asserting that they aren’t voluntarily handing over user data. They also are emphatically rejecting newspaper reports indicating that PRISM has opened a door for the NSA to tap directly on the companies’ data centers whenever the government pleases.

In his statement, Clapper appeared to support that claim by stressing that the government did not act unilaterally, but with court authority.

The Guardian reported Saturday that it had obtained top-secret documents detailing an NSA tool, called Boundless Informant, that maps the information it collects from computer and telephone networks by country. The paper said the documents show NSA collected almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from U.S. computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March, which the paper says calls into question NSA statements that it cannot determine how many Americans may be accidentally included in its computer surveillance.

NSA spokesperson Judith Emmel said Saturday that “current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication.” She said it may be possible to determine that a communication “traversed a particular path within the Internet,” but added that “it is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address.”

Emmel said communications are filtered both by automated processes and NSA staff to make sure Americans’ privacy is respected.

“This is not just our judgment, but that of the relevant inspectors general, who have also reported this,” she said.

Amid unsettling reports of government spying, Obama assured the nation Friday that “nobody is listening to your telephone calls. What the government is doing, he said, is digesting phone numbers and the durations of calls, seeking links that might “identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.”

While Obama on Friday said the aim of the programs is to make America safe, he offered no specifics about how the surveillance programs have done that. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on Thursday said the phone records sweeps had thwarted a domestic terror attack, but he also didn’t offer specifics.

The revelations have divided Congress and led civil liberties advocates and some constitutional scholars to accuse Obama of crossing a line in the name of rooting out terror threats.

Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, strove to calm Americans’ fears but also to remind them that Congress and the courts had signed off on the surveillance.

“I think the American people understand that there are some trade-offs involved,” he said when questioned by reporters at a health care event in San Jose, Calif.

Obama echoed intelligence experts – both inside and outside the government – who predicted that potential attackers will find other, secretive ways to communicate now that they know that their phone and Internet records may be targeted.

An al-Qaida affiliated website on Saturday warned against using the Internet to discuss issues related to militant activities in three long articles on what it called “America’s greatest and unprecedented scandal of spying on its own citizens and people in other countries.”

“Caution: Oh brothers, it is a great danger revealing PRISM, the greatest American spying project,” wrote one member, describing the NSA program that gathers information from major U.S. Internet companies.

“A highly important caution for the Internet jihadis ... American intelligence gets information from Facebook and Google,” wrote another.

Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., who served on the House Intelligence Committee for a decade, said “the bad folks’ antennas go back up and they become more cautious for a period of time.”

“But we’ll just keep coming up with more sophisticated ways to dig into these data. It becomes a techies game, and we will try to come up with new tools to cut through the clutter,” he said.

Hoekstra said he approved the phone surveillance program but did not know about the online spying.