So the National Security Agency is going to be part of the N.C. State family. With a $60.75 million grant from the NSA, the largest research contract in the university’s history, the two will partner to establish the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences on Centennial Campus.
The NSA couldn’t have chosen more dramatic timing — right before the start of semester, at the end of a summer in which it has gained more notoriety than ever. The PRISM leaks in early June exposed the NSA for its indiscriminate spying on U.S. and foreign citizens alike. (The major revelation of the leaks was that the NSA has direct access to the servers of major Internet companies, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft.) These leaks prompted a good amount of discourse about expanding state power, privacy, free speech, etc. The saga to track down Edward Snowden, the whistleblower responsible for the leaks, became an international political Hollywood-esque drama.
Behind all the frenzy though, a certain assumption about how the world works is guiding much of the discourse and action regarding the PRISM leaks and the NSA. This is the belief that surveillance leads to state tyranny and paves the way for totalitarianism. But does it really?
No. The causality actually goes the other way around.
The prevalent thesis — advanced by civil libertarians and many hackers and adopted by the public — is that if entities of power know things about us, i.e., if our privacy is eroded, then the control of our ideas also takes place and our free speech is lost, and with that, the foundation for totalitarianism is laid. But let’s think about this. What is happening is that the state now has the power to know more, to “see” more. But the state’s power to control matters besides being able to know things has not necessarily increased as a result of this increased knowledge (as compared to co-occuring with or leading to increased knowledge). It is this jump from the power to know more to an overall increase in power, from the power to surveil to the power in general to do more, that is unsound.
Even if the state can know more about areas of people’s lives that existed before there were means for the state to know about them, conditions have not changed such that the state is allowed to do more things regarding these areas. In fact, if it does do so, if the state uses what it now knows to act in domains where its jurisdiction has in fact not increased, then what this means is not that increased knowledge has led to the state becoming tyrannical — rather, the correct analysis would suggest that the state was already tyrannical in nature. Surveillance, then, is only a contrivance that enables a state’s pre-existing tyrannical nature to manifest itself. After all, only if a state were already such that it would control and impede upon the free exchange of ideas would it use its powers of surveillance for such a purpose.
Thus, the “surveillance leads to totalitarianism” notion has the logic the wrong way around. In these conditions, attacking surveillance is akin to making a fuss about the police car when a policeman goes rogue and becomes depraved. Of course, the policeman wouldn’t be able to do horrible things without the contrivance of the police car, but wouldn’t it be wiser to do something about the policeman rather than protest the police car?
A nuanced understanding of reality, rather than being guided by clichéd beliefs, is necessary for well-directed and effective action. If we want to do something about state tyranny and surveillance, we need to stop and think about which the fundamental problem is and recognize the value of addressing it rather than its symptoms. And though the critical process itself may be complex, the conclusion here is simple — what we are afraid of coming to life is already alive, and if our fears are valid, we need, radically need, to rethink our very fight, let alone how to fight it.
