The Pandora's box of surveillance

A secret shared by a thousand people isn’t much of a secret. As Snowden has demonstrated and Alexander has confirmed, the NSA’s surveillance programs are inherently vulnerable and easily compromised. The NSA has demonstrated that it can neither guarantee the secrecy of its surveillance systems nor safeguard the privacy of the individuals who generate the bits of data. As the NSA’s surveillance system continues to expand, its collections will become only more vulnerable, as hundreds or maybe thousands of new employees and contractors sign on to manage the data load and devise new means of extracting and manipulating data. Alexander may be tempted to re-change the passwords and establish a four-man rule for access to data, but will he? The data can only be useful to the government if it remains accessible, and if there’s more data the demands for access to it will only rise, which means more potential Snowdens will be touching it. The NSA has a tiger by the tail.

Assuming that Snowden has maintained access to gigabytes of NSA data he purloined, I wonder when the Fort Meade signal-grabbers will begin to regret having collected and centralized such a sensitive, transportable stockpile. Not quite a Pandora’s box, the NSA hoard exudes similar destructive power. Dispensed to the press by a civil libertarian like Snowden, it can be a weapon to blunt the surveillance state that created it. But in the hands of a hostile nation or belligerent force like al Qaeda, it might become a how-to guide to advanced surveillance. And the data, oh, the data! A document from 2008 quotes Gen. Alexander asking (let’s hope he was joking), “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” If unchecked, the NSA’s data collection will eventually make Jorge Borges’s idea of Library of Babel — a universal library of everything — look like a toddler’s collection of Golden Books. After all, Borges was only looking back to the beginning of time; IBM estimates that 90 percent of the data in the world has been created in the last two years, suggesting a surveillance state must expand like an exploding star just to keep up.