Last week, the Guardian, a British newspaper that devotes much of its space to reporting on bikini bodies [see update below], broke the story of the NSA’s surveillance program known as PRISM, in a series of articles that I suspect most people did not read. I certainly agree that this is a big deal, but some of the urgency behind the backlash against this program puzzles me. Is anyone honestly surprised by this? Do people not remember the past eleven years? Where has this level of outrage been up to now?

Of course, I think I know the answer to that last question, and it is similar to the newfound outrage people had over the TSA’s groping practices: now the “war on terror” is affecting us (and by “us” I mean affluent white people, mostly.)

Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers fame, is warning about the “United Stasi of America,” as if that is something that could happen tomorrow if we don’t do………something, I’m not sure what. The story has also given Glenn Greenwald, a writer I used to respect greatly, more opportunities at self-aggrandizement.

The simple fact is that most legislators have unclean hands in all of this, save a few. The revelation of this program’s existence gives us an opportunity to have a national dialogue about how much surveillance we are willing to accept in the name of “national security,” but I have my doubts that we’ll actually get to that discussion amid all the hysteria. Everything the White House has done was arguably authorized by the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, so the first thing Congress could do would be to repeal, or at least limit, that law. <crickets>

Here are a few relevant quotes from an update on the surveillance program offered by the Guardian, with my commentary:

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been empowered by a secret order issued by the foreign intelligence court directing Verizon Communications, a mobile phone provider with 98.9 million wireless customers, to turn over all its call records for a three-month period. [It is a limited period of time, subject to a court order. It is critical for us, the public, to know more about what is going on, but remember the kerfuffle a few years ago over the administration’s need to bypass the foreign intelligence court entirely?]

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Under the order, the NSA only gains access to the “metadata” around calls – when they were made, what numbers they were made to, where they were made from and how long the calls lasted. [So no one is listening in on your calls, at least under this program.]

Obtaining the content of the calls, or the names or addresses of the callers would make the surveillance wiretapping, which would count as a separate issue legally. [Note the use of the conditional tense here. No one knows for sure that widespread wiretapping is going on.]

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It is unknown how Prism actually works. [No comment needed, really.]

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The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President George Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012. [Don’t act so surprised, everybody.]

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A fact sheet leaked to the Guardian explains that almost 3bn pieces of intelligence had been collected from US computer networks in the 30-day period ending in March this year, as well as indexing almost 100bn pieces worldwide. [That’s a lot of data. One might even call it a shitload. Not that it justifies such widespread data collection, but the odds are that they are looking for something more important than your phone sex habits.]

[Emphasis added]

I don’t think there is much information that the NSA is gathering that most of us don’t voluntarily hand over to private corporations every day (Google, Facebook, AT&T, etc.) Most of that information is mundane, or at worst pathetic. Yes, the “surveillance state” is getting bigger, and we absolutely have to address that, but we also need to accept that we have implicitly agreed to turn over details of our lives to others multiple times every day.

We are talking about hundreds of billions of records of metadata. Even assuming that each record is small, say a few dozen kilobytes or something, we are still talking about amounts of data for which most of us don’t even know the prefix. Petabytes, maybe, or even exabytes. It wouldn’t surprise me if the NSA ventures into yottabyte territory. Good luck doing anything useful with that much data, but I still don’t like having it lying around like that. I’m just not as worried about imminent tyranny as many seem to be. There is roughly zero chance right now that someone’s phone sex records could go from the NSA’s database to that person’s spouse’s divorce attorney—although the fact that a private sector contractor leaked the program in the first place would make such a disclosure more likely, really. Similarly, the odds of local law enforcement being able to access data from the NSA remains slim, and we have an opportunity to advocate for laws that prevent that from happening.

Do we want to keep the NSA’s data from other agencies, though? Consider this observation from The Economist:

It would also be a good thing if the NSA were blocked from routinely mining patterns from every phone call made in America in the hopes of finding something that matches up with terrorism. Another approach would be to see whether we can erect clearly enforced firewalls that prohibit the NSA from sharing its knowledge that you were in bed with your mistress with prosecutors. Then again, the fact that different intelligence agencies weren’t allowed to pool their knowledge was precisely what outraged Americans in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. [Emphasis added]

At a bare minimum, the NSA has a mandate to protect us and a modicum of accountability to the public (via elections, the 1st Amendment right to petition for redress of grievances, etc.) Google, et al have no such mandate, and can use the information we voluntarily give them just about however they want. In the long run, I’m far more worried about how the private sector uses this data than the government. That’s also why the government’s use of contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton is a critical part of this “scandal” for me.

This “scandal” (if it even remotely deserves that name) could still hurt Silicon Valley through consumer backlash, but I have my suspicions that it will be more like the backlash against the airlines over TSA groping. Remember how we stood up as a nation and demanded that the TSA respect our bodily integrity, facing delayed or even missed flights as the price of our fight for freedom? Neither do I, because that never happened, and TSA agents (who might have responded to a job ad on a pizza box) continue to touch our junk with relative impunity.

How much are we willing to do to fight back against encroaching surveillance? Remember how Google+ offered greater privacy protections than Facebook, and everyone abandoned Facebook en masse? Neither do I. We may have fewer privacy protections, and we may feel righteously outraged, but good luck giving up your cell phone or your steady supply of lolcats.

If people want to get outraged about this, they should. I’ll even stop asking why now instead of any time since 2001. If you want to actually do something, tell your Congressional representatives to support repeal or modification of the PATRIOT Act, to take away the legal justification for PRISM and other programs. If Congress refuses to do so, and we reelect the same people, then I guess we deserve what we get. If Congress repeals the law, and the White House keeps at it, then we’ve got problems.

UPDATE, June 11, 2013: I mischaracterized The Guardian as a newspaper that devotes multiple column inches to bikini bodies. I was thinking of The Daily Mail, which has intrepid reporting on Denise Richards’ well-defined calves and similarly hard-hitting stories. I regret the error.

Photo credit: By Kwertii at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.