In another major Christmas report, Der Spiegel investigates the scale of the NSA’s ability to retrieve data from digital services. The NSA’s efforts to create backdoor access to digital services so that it can tap into digital communications, as well as its attempts to weaken internet security more generally through lobbying efforts, are evidence of a worldview in which privacy is considered an obstacle to intelligence, and intelligence is equated with making all digital communication instantly transparent.
In the language of the Fourth Amendment, our “papers and effects” are now largely digital. They include not just our interpersonal communications, diaries, and receipts, but out location data, list of contacts, and metadata. It is laughably Orwellian that one of our major intelligence and security agencies sees its job as making our private data less secure.
A security agency worth paying for would actually look for vulnerabilities in popular software products from Google and Apple; when it found them, it would suggest patches and better encryption techniques. In other words, a security agency worthy of the name would presume the American public and American companies are innocent before proven guilty, and worth protecting from prying eyes whether they be a foreign government or some scummy hacker collective.
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