Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone

[KoKo]

6. [b]The Unknown Unknowns[/b]

(This is a long but well-written article putting into context how overwhelming this surveillance of all of us has become. And, what we don't know because the technology is moving so fast. This snip is from the end of the article)

The Unknown Unknowns

Note that we’ve only begun a tour through the ways in which American privacy is currently under assault by our own government. Other examples abound. There is E-Verify’s proposed giant “right-to-work” list of everyone eligible to work in the United States. There are law enforcement agencies that actively monitor social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are the Department of Homeland Security’s research and development efforts to create cameras armed with almost omniscient facial recognition technology, not to speak of passports issued with radio frequency identification technology. There are networked surveillance camera feeds that flow into government systems. There is NSA surveillance data that’s finding its way into domestic drug investigations, which is then hidden by the DEA from defense lawyers, prosecutors, and the courts to ensure the surveillance data stream continues unchallenged.

And here’s the thing: this is only what we know about. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it, “there are also unknown unknowns -- there are things we do not know we don't know.” It would be the height of naïveté to believe that government organizations across this country -- from the federal to the municipal level -- aren’t engaged in other secret and shocking privacy intrusions that have yet to be revealed to us. If the last few months have taught us anything, it should be that we are in a world of unknown unknowns.

Today, government agencies act as if they deserve the benefit of the doubt as they secretly do things ripped from the pages of science-fiction novels. Once upon a time, that’s not how things were to run in a land where people prized their right to be let alone and government of the people, by the people, and for the people was supposed to operate in the open. The government understands this perfectly well: Why else would its law enforcement agents and officers regularly go to remarkable lengths, sometimes at remarkable cost, to conceal their actions from the rest of us and the legal system that is supposed to oversee their acts? Which is why whistleblowers like Edward Snowden are so important: they mount the last line of defense when the powers-that-be get too accustomed to operating in the dark.

Without our very own Snowdens working in the county sheriff’s departments or big city police departments or behemoth federal bureaucracies, especially with the world of newspapers capsizing, the unknowns are ever more likely to stay unknown, while what little privacy we have left vanishes.