Democracy dies under mass surveillance

Americans find themselves always under a watchful digital eye. (Photo: Mandy Coriston for Public Square Amplified)

Newark- The advent of the digital age has been a renaissance regarding our access to information and communication. Having a digital presence is an essential element of this newfound connectivity, but that need for a digital presence also exposes us to mass surveillance. Thanks to laws like Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the government is empowered to conduct mass surveillance with minimal safeguards to protect our privacy and rights.

Because of this power, digital mass surveillance is trampling our very democracy.

As noted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “Although the law allows surveillance of foreigners abroad for ‘foreign intelligence’ purposes, the FBI routinely exploits this rich source of our information by searching those databases to find and examine the communications of individual Americans for use in domestic investigations.”

Statistics from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s annual transparency reports indicate a sharp rise in FISA Section 702 targets, which are meant to be only non-US persons acting outside the United States. However, Section 702 provides that US persons’ digital communications with non-US persons are subject to collection under probable query. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and others have revealed that Section 702, alongside other surveillance regulations, is frequently misused. (Sources: 2023_ASTR_for_CY2022.pdf (dni.gov), 2020_ASTR_for_CY2019_FINAL.pdf (dni.gov), Graphic: Mandy Coriston for Public Square Amplified)

The implementation of mass surveillance and the laws and fear used to justify it have no place in a democracy. The potential for the digital age to strengthen democracy is open for debate, but the evidence that governmental institutions are leveraging the digital sphere for anti-democratic mass surveillance purposes is irrefutable. 

Earlier this year marked the 10th anniversary of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s exposé of the illegal mass surveillance programs being run by the NSA to collect the phone records of virtually all Americans. Such warrantless searches are an affront to the Constitutional protections of the 4th Amendment, which states: 

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Probable cause is an important standard for our protection against government aggression. To meet the probable cause standard, the government must establish that a crime has been committed or that communications requested via warrant will show evidence of that crime. This crucial safeguarding of our rights is a staple in a viable, functioning democracy because it prevents the government from collecting information about our lives without any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. 

A government with a free hand to rifle through your digital presence seeking a crime that has neither been committed nor even suspected of being committed makes us each a target for persecution at any time and for any reason. Fabricated excuses for trampling democracy in such a manner have become the modus operandi in the name of national security. It is a sad reality that the Constitution has been reduced to a nuisance to the agencies sworn to uphold it. 

Abuse of power is nothing new 

We have been mistaken, or perhaps misled into thinking, that this sort of mass surveillance is something new or a necessity for law enforcement in this digital age. National defense institutions like the FBI, NSA, and CIA, among others, use fear to justify warrantless searches as a crucial means of protecting the nation from threats, particularly in this digital era. 

From my personal experience working within the intelligence community, such arguments are dubious at best. I was witness to an intelligence system that was full of prideful, if not purposeful, autonomy characterized by the inability to work together, the disregard of signs of threats to national security, and the placing of self-serving political agendas above the duty of protecting the nation. 

Digital age or not, the capability to effectively protect this nation while following its laws would not be an issue if those agencies charged with protecting us would just do their jobs. When such a system unavoidably fails, scare tactics are used to justify more money, more capability, and more dilution of our rights and democracy. We must remember, though, that fearmongering as a vehicle to subvert the Constitution in the name of national security is nothing new. 

Historically, societal panic over perceived threats to national security was used as a frequent excuse by the government to surveil and monitor political dissidents like the Black activists and members of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and many other groups fighting for and in the name of democracy. NSA has routinely run illegal surveillance programs like SHAMROCK and MINARET, but there have also been other efforts, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO and CIA’s CHAOS, among others. The list of past illegal surveillance programs most likely pales in comparison to the programs put in place after 9/11. It took the revelations of Edward Snowden to bring the continued existence of these illegal programs, such as PRISM and Upstream, to light.

Such surveillance programs are not founded on any legitimate principle of protecting our democracy but, instead, are created and maintained to subjugate it. Think back to J. Edgar Hoover, who authorized the monitoring and collection of data on Martin Luther King, Jr. and other members of the Civil Rights Movement. The purported justification for the illegal activity was the suspicion of communist influences (read: national security concern) upon these individuals and groups. 

The reality was that the entire motivation was Hoover’s unabashed racism and hatred toward the Civil Rights Movement. All Hoover had to do to subvert the rights of the citizens he was charged to protect was wrap his bigotry in the fear-cloak of national security. Political dissent is an essential part of democracy. The Civil Rights Movement, anti-war movements, Black Lives Matter, and other efforts at dissent are elements of our society that strive to reinforce and strengthen democracy, not destroy it. 

Mass surveillance undermines democracy

Mass surveillance has no place in a democracy because it is too easily used as a government tool to monitor, silence, and persecute political and social dissent. Under mass surveillance, anyone, at any time, can be targeted and open to prosecution, all at the unshackled whims of any government agency motivated to look for anything that can be viewed as a crime. Without the protections of the 4th Amendment, there is nothing to stop our intimate digital conversations and information from being used as evidence against us for actions and interactions that may very well not be criminal. This is the risk we all bear if illegal programs like mass surveillance are allowed to continue.

We take issue with digital giants like Google and Facebook using our private data; why does that concern stop when the government is doing the collecting? There is an argument that national security should be prioritized over personal security, but I find such arguments to be shortsighted. True, there are differences, mainly that national security measures are there to protect the nation and that privacy protects individuals. 

National security and privacy are not mutually exclusive; they can and must coexist. The nation is made up of individuals, and programs like mass surveillance that trample the privacy rights of the individuals that make up this nation trample on the nation and our democracy as a whole. 

But we do have the ability to do something about this self-inflicted insurrection upon our democracy. We must be vigilant against mindsets that foster a society that accepts mass surveillance as part of the government’s overall duty to keep us safe and to protect our national security. The “nothing to hide” mentality does nothing but bolster that false argument.  

As the ACLU states, “You have no idea if you have something to fear or not because you do not know what the government does with the data it collects.” 

Indeed, if everything about us is being collected without any basis other than fear-mongered concerns for national security, then we all have something to hide. 

Democracy is suffering as a result.

In addition, we can and must use the vote that so many fought so hard for us to have and make sure the politicians we vote into office are continually held accountable, particularly in their oversight of the government institutions that blatantly ignore and are destroying our democracy. We can and must continue to stand up to and expose the fear-mongering that allows illegal government surveillance to grow against our democracy. 

The danger to democracy posed by mass surveillance is self-evident, but that does not mean that government surveillance is a new reality that we must all just accept. National security is important, but it cannot be an acceptable or tolerated end to justify the illegal means. For the sake of democracy, we must strive to hold our government accountable for its actions, which are the antithesis of democracy. Section 702 is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2023. We must tell our representatives in Congress NOT to vote for its renewal.

If we do not take a stand, then democracy’s days are numbered. 

This digital age may be a vehicle for the government to destroy our democracy, but it can also be a potent tool for educating ourselves on what rights we have, learning what the government is and has been doing to subvert those rights, and organizing to protect those rights. Such involvement and calls to action are what democracy is all about.