Ideologically Battling the Surveillance State

Glenn Greenwald published a great editorial Friday about the dangers of domestic surveillance drones.  Greenwald points out a number of alarming possibilities, including the seemingly inevitable introduction of weaponized drones onto U.S. soil and the approaching economic viability of an all seeing drone network.  The editorial also refers to the difficulty of explicitly articulating an argument against the vague threat of an all seeing future government/corporatocracy, but it’s here that privacy and freedom lovers should focus their energy.

Laying out the impact of pervasive surveillance is not enough

In July 2012, Greenwald delivered a lengthy speech outlining the contours of the vast, secret U.S. surveillance state.  He attempts to refute the “you don’t have anything to worry about if you’re not doing anything wrong” position by clearly explaining what exactly we lose by constantly being watched.  First, dissident activity is greatly impeded by government surveillance.  Cointelpro-type programs can break up Al Qaeda and hurt the Arian Nation, but they also snuff out nascent Civil Rights and Feminist movements before they start.  More broadly Greenwald notes that being watched curbs “dissent… creativity, and challenges to orthodoxy” and “breeds conformism.”  This constant surveillance creates a “climate of fear” which trains citizens not to engage in certain behavior, ultimately leading people to conform on their own without any threat of external coercion.  As persuasive as all of these arguments are, the most powerful argument against Big Brother is a more basic one:  Some government bureaucrat has no right to read my emails to my mom or listen to me talk to my fucking wife.

Opponents of the surveillance state have to render it completely illegitimate

Here’s a conversation related to murder that you’ll probably never hear:

Chad:  Hey man, why’d you kill Ken?

Bryan:  He had a lot of cool shit bro – nice house that I get to stay in now, nice car I whip around…

Chad: But Ken was a real cool dude man, and he had a long fruitful life to live.

Bryan: Not as long as mine.  I’m twenty fucking three bro and he’s 56.  Think about how much better I’m gonna live it up for decades with all of Ken’s shit, and he would’ve probably died soon anyway.

Chad: But Ken’s earnings were higher so his present value contribution to society would’ve been greater, man, and…

The reason no one would ever talk like this is because murder (at least domestically) is wrong.  That’s it.  There’s no justifying murder with arguments about its impact, no cost-benefit analysis.  The same goes for rape, (formerly) torture, pedophilia, blatant racist speech, cursing dead soldiers and a number of other behaviors society doesn’t tolerate.  The key for privacy advocates and freedom fighters is to transform the discussion about the surveillance state from a debate about safety and civil liberties tradeoffs, to a loud affirmation of your right not to have some government hack sifting through your private life.

Privacy and freedom activists must ridicule spying and the spying bureaucrats

How might this argument look?  “I don’t want some fucking desk jockey in Fort Meade reading my love letters” or “Why should Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly get to sneak a peak at my wang while I piss in Prospect Park?” or “Seattle PD has no right to watch my alley to see whether I throw a banana peel in the recycling bin” or “I don’t want some bored loser at the Department of Justice listening to my weed buying phone calls to get his little thrill for the day” or “Get the hell away from my daughter with your creepy Cryptokids bullshit.”

The key is to delegitimize the process of surveillance and the people that conduct the surveillance without getting into a cost-benefit fight that provides implicit recognition to the watchers.  The Right has done a pretty good job of this by shitting all over TSA officers.  They don’t discuss how the search process won’t make us safer or what the impact of intrusive searches is on our psyche.  Instead, they create sensationalist videos of TSA officers groping people and post heroic stories of citizens stripping down to resist the government’s tyranny.  Although it’s much harder to do this with agencies that operate completely in the dark, opponents of the surveillance state must find a way to delegitimize, ridicule and directly confront the bureaucrats, politicians and law enforcement officers who are intent on snooping through and recording every mundane detail of our lives. Otherwise, we might as well shut the door and turn the clock back to 1984.