Boing Boing has some interesting excerpts from an interview with William Gibson re. the new NSA controversy.  He points out that as a society we’ve (Americans) been assuming that the CIA et.al. has been doing this kind of stuff for years anyway, and that during the Cold War we were even comforted by the idea that they were listening anyway.  I’d argue that many people are still comforted by this idea as we fight terrorism.

Reading this caused me to look at this another way.  A few years ago I did some work in the “database marketing” field.  I was stunned at how much information companies like Acxiom are collecting about all of us every day, but it didn’t really bother me that much because the data they were collecting had mostly to do with our habits as consumers.  What we buy, where we buy it, etc.  And they sold that data to companies whose only real goal was to figure out how to get us to buy more of their stuff. They really didn’t have any motivation to use it any other way. Still, even then there were privacy advocates who were worried that the data could and would be used for more nefarious purposes.  They pointed out that if the government decided to pay for the data the companies would have an instant profit motive for releasing the data.  And then, of course, there was the problem of the companies losing the data or having it hijacked by hackers, but that’s another story.

What makes this “government spying on citizens” meme so disturbing to me is that the government has not been forthright about what they’re doing, and not just on this issue I might add, and so there is no reason to trust them when they say they’re just doing it to fight terrorism.  That’s what happens when you violate the public trust: just when you may need us to trust you most we say “f— you.” 

Ironically I think if the government had said, “Hey, without getting into the details we want you to know that this is the kind of thing we’re doing to fight terrorism.  To protect the innocent we’re cooperating with the fill-in-the-blank oversight committee to make sure that we don’t violate citizens’ rights…oh, and by the way we couldn’t use any of this information in any kind of court because it was not obtained in the proper manner and was never intended for that use anyway” then many of us would welcome what they’re doing in principle. 

But the government assumes we’re idiots, that we can’t be trusted and they know better than us what we need/want.  That’s the other irony: this administration has created more of a “nanny state” than any of its supposedly more liberal predecessors.  This from a regime that turned “liberal” into an epithet.

And we have three more years of this crap.