In the early 90s, I was likely one of the
few Americans working for a certain big Finnish IT company. In my case, it was
part of a team in Helsinki writing user manuals for server and system software
(very little of which I actually understood, it has to be said).
At some point, another American I’ll call
James joined the company as a project manager. Apparently, he had been an
exchange student here in his youth, and memories of those days had prompted him
to make the unlikely move to relocate to a place where he had practically no
connections.
He was, in some ways, the odd man out. He
was older, unattached, and more buttoned-down than my other colleagues. And
unlike the other expats I knew, he hadn’t moved to Finland because of romance,
which was a bit rare in those days. This was long before the golden age of
Finnish high-tech, when the chance of working at dynamic, cutting-edge firms
(at least one in particular) was enough to draw smart, geeky foreigners, like
James, to the cold, dark north.
Among ourselves, we joked that James must
have been a spy. Remember, this wasn’t that long after the Cold War, when the
working assumption among many was that Helsinki was a natural fault line for
East-West espionage. (I still recall how the downtown office of the Teboil service-station
chain was widely seen as a front for the KGB.)
I’m sure James was no spy, but with his
deep roots in the IT world, he did know things. One conversation I remember
from those days was when he explained the function of the super-secret National
Security Agency, an outfit I’d probably never heard of before.
James described the giant dish antennas on
the East Coast used by the big US telecommunications companies for the downlink
of all trans-Atlantic phone traffic. He went on to tell about a second set of
dishes directly behind the first, perfectly positioned to scoop up the very
same overseas phone traffic and feed it to the NSA supercomputers that then
searched this torrent of data for words of particular interest to the American
government. Perhaps even back then, this was no real secret, but rather public
knowledge to anyone interested enough to find out. I don’t know for sure.
Anyway, maybe that’s why, when calling my
parents from Helsinki, I used to half-seriously envision that someone in the
depths of the US intelligence apparatus might be listening as we chatted about
the most mundane things imaginable. After all, mine was part of the “foreign”
communication that the NSA was tasked with intercepting.
Things have changed since then, and in
some ways, they haven’t. Washington is now in an uproar of the first magnitude
over the revelations by a former CIA/NSA tech support guy, Edward Snowden,
about the extent of the data harvested nowadays by the NSA from domestic phone
and Internet traffic. It’s huge, and it’s not just foreign traffic.
Some Americans suddenly feel their liberty
has been violated by the fact that information (metadata, mind you, not
content) of every phone call they make is being routinely collected by the NSA,
and not because any of these people are suspected of any crime. Not yet,
anyway.
It’s a fascinating case. For one, the
shock and outrage of some people is curious, considering that the broad outline
of NSA’s expanded activity has been public for years. It was a key part of a
new reality that Americans seem ready to accept after the horror of 9/11. (The
Patriot Act, which expanded the NSA’s surveillance powers, sailed through
Congress barely six weeks after the Twin Towers fell.)
And it reflects the new reality of an
online world. In the Internet age of Google data mining and voluntary
exhibitionism on Facebook, it seems almost quaint to find people suddenly so
concerned about privacy.
It seems I’m not one of them. I belong to the majority of Americans (56% according to
a recent poll) who tend not to be too bothered by this new reality. Maybe
I should be. At least, some people tell us we should all be.
It’s not as if my entire life is an open
book, but generally speaking, I have nothing to hide. (And I do recognize how
boring that sounds.) Well, I do have some secrets, but there is nothing I
wouldn’t want surfacing in an NSA intercept. Nothing that I might talk about on
the phone or do online is going to get me indicted, unless it’s a crime to
spend too much time surfing the net. I’m not the kind of person the NSA is
interested in.
That’s not to say that people who are skittish
about the invasion of privacy are guilty of any kind of wrongdoing. It’s just
that they have a more finely tuned sense of mistrust and personal liberty than
I do. They are, in a sense, more principled. They will argue that the Fourth
Amendment constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches (without
probable cause) applies just as much to law-abiding citizens as it does to
people who do have something to hide, maybe even more so. They will argue that
giving up even a small measure of this privacy for the sake of more security is
unacceptable. Until now, however, they seem to be a minority in the US.
Still, there is a certain segment of the
population, for which privacy is an overwhelming fixation. I know people who
are a bit freaked out that their house is visible on Google Maps Street View,
as if that is significantly different from someone being able to see it in
person from a public road.
There are people who chafe at the sight of
security cameras at every street corner. (Once, I saw spray-painted in large
letters on a wall on a London street the text “One Nation Under CCTV” – a terse
commentary on the huge concentration of video surveillance in that city).
Personally, I don’t mind being watched all that much. Apparently, others
do.
An especially telling example of this at
the moment are the people in my home county in Georgia who are fretting that
unmanned drones will soon be flying overhead, spying not only on moonshiners,
but also on the ordinary citizenry.
This fear seems to stem from certain
technology and business interests in Georgia trying to establish a center for
drone research in the state. Why my hometown should feel especially threatened
by this isn’t exactly clear to me, unless it’s a case of local officials trying
to drum up business by offering the county as a potential site for the drone
facility. To me, it sounds like a paranoid response.
It’s not as if concerns over privacy are
always based on reality. Once, back when everyone in Helsinki still had a
landline phone, I was complaining to a co-worker about how phone bills in
Finland are not itemized (by number called, duration, etc.). I was surprised by
her reaction.
In the days before cell phones, a common
experience for American college students was the settling of the monthly phone
bill. Going down the list of long-distance calls made with the phone you shared
with your room- or house-mates, you would tally up who owed what for which
calls. We’d also often discover calls charged to our phone by mistake (or “by
mistake”, if you didn't necessarily think the phone company was trustworthy).
Itemized bills helped keep both roommates and the phone company honest.
This is what I was complaining to my
co-worker, about how you can’t do this in Finland because all charges, both
local and long-distance, were presented together in one lump sum. I told her
how I’d prefer to see all long-distance calls I’d made itemized in the bill.
Out of defensiveness, I think, over a
foreigner like myself daring to criticize how things are done in Finland, my
co-worker instantly exclaimed, “Well, I wouldn’t like that at all. I wouldn’t
want anyone to know who I had been calling.”
I didn’t say it, but of course this is a
ludicrous way to think. If there is anyone who knows precisely which numbers
you have called, it would surely be the company routing those calls (and
charging you for them). If you object to the phone company having this information,
you might want to rethink whether you should be using a phone at all.
Of course, that was an extreme (and to be
frank, stupid) example of an exaggerated sense of privacy. Now, with all the
news about the NSA leaks, such concern over privacy is the one thing that some
people will no doubt be all too willing to share with others.
