PRIVATE EYES ARE LOOKING

What value does privacy have for us? Given the recent uproar over the revelations regarding the methods used by the National Security Agency (NSA) in gathering information on the communication activities of Americans, one can assume quite a bit. The idea of government having access to our phone calls, emails, other social media use, and the like makes us very uneasy. We know that the history of totalitarian regimes and their reliance on gathering such information lend to our imaginations of government overcoming our liberties – and rightly so. After all, the founding generation had such concerns, one, from our experiences under British rule and, two, from concerns that a newly formed central government could exert such power over our recently gained freedoms. So concerned were they that the political process produced and ratified the Fourth Amendment. That bit of constitutional law protects against government unreasonably searching and seizing our things, including our papers and other information without a warrant. My purpose here is not to review or comment on this NSA scandal, but to suggest that if all this is troubling, we might want to give some very serious attention to what the private sector is able to acquire in terms of our personal information.

I want to review some of these capacities – relying on Amitai Etzioni's account¹ – of how private corporate entities, often in conjunction with government and sometimes not, have magnified the ability to gather a great deal of information about us. Never mind that the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (1994) requires that telecommunication businesses build in capacities for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to have the ability to perform wiretaps. Private corporations, for their own uses, have developed and expanded their abilities to gather information on us. Seemingly, their purposes are limited to marketing aims, but the potential is chilling. Someone is keeping track of what you buy on the Internet, whom and how often you email, what you watch on cable, where and when you go about town or wherever else, your net worth, your real estate holdings, social security numbers, where you live and where you've lived, phone numbers, fax numbers, neighbors' names, and on and on. A lot of this information is in the public domain, but some is not, and these businesses that make it their business to know about you are using more and more sophisticated technologies to do their work. Here is Etzioni's summary of these efforts:

In short, corporations do almost everything that the federal government has been banned from doing under various laws … . [O]ne must note, first of all, that the violation of privacy by private agents often has the same effects as identical violations committed by government agents. Thus, when gay people who seek to keep their sexual orientation private are “outed” by the media, or banks call in loans of those they find out have cancer, or employers refuse to hire people because they find out about their political or religious views, privacy is violated in a manner about as consequential as if the same violations had been carried out by a government agency.²

All of these potential abuses – chilling just in terms of their possible eventuality – could dampen our liberty in very real ways. And before you think that all of this is limited to private entities, remember that all of this information is available to government.

It's not as if we haven't had presidents who formed lists of enemies and attempted to circumvent constitutional safeguards in order to discredit and intimidate opponents of their policy aims. Oh! I know a plot for a political thriller: devotees of Richard Nixon gather DNA from some old hairbrush of the former president and clone a slew of humans with this DNA so they can grow up to be the former president's genetic copies. Eventually, one is bound to become a future president and accomplish what Nixon tried to do. The only thing is, in the future this Nixon will have much more advanced technology and a stored bank of information that private corporations have already accumulated. We can call the thriller, Boys from Silicon Valley.³ Oh, that's right; the plot has already been used.

Let me share two businesses Etzioni identifies as particular firms that are doing quite a bit of gathering and have contracts with government agencies in which they share a cache of information. There is Choicepoint – 35 government contracts including with the Justice Department – and SeisInt – gathering criminal records, SSNs, bankruptcy information, property ownership, family names, credit, and other information.

Of course, such activities are an affront to the natural rights view of government. In terms of this construct's concern over private businesses gathering such information, this construct is not so clear. After all, what these businesses do, as long as laws are not broken, might not be really interfering with others' rights. If you come to the conclusion that such gathering is what someone wants to do, then others can be free to protect that information from being detected. Don't use social media, don't write emails, don't watch cable TV, don't go on the Internet, don't make a call on your phone, don't own a cell phone, don't live a modern life. A federalist concern transcends this view. The mere fact that if a person's individual ability to freely and in a non-threatened way participate in the political process is limited in any way, then federalist thinking is concerned with such a development. Such an eventuality diminishes the ability of people to be federated with each other. And this concern can be what a civics class can use to address this whole area of invading a person's privacy.

1Etzioni, A. (2013). The bankruptcy of liberalism and conservatism. Political Science Quarterly, 128 (1), pp. 39-65.

2Ibid., p. 50.

3For the sake of the younger readers of this blog, Boys from Brazil (1978) is a film starring Gregory Peck and Lawrence Olivier. The plot idea in the text is borrowed from this film.