Politics

Das Spionagespiel

Jul 5, 2013 Peter Singer

MELBOURNE – Dank Edward Snowden weiß ich jetzt, dass die National Security Agency (NSA) der USA mich ausspioniert. Sie nutzt Google, Facebook, Verizon und andere Internet- und Kommunikationsunternehmen, um enorme Mengen an digitalen Informationen zu erheben, darunter zweifellos Daten über meine E-Mails, Handygespräche und Kreditkartennutzung.

Ich bin kein US-Bürger; daher ist das Ganze völlig legal. Und selbst wenn ich ein US-Bürger wäre, könnte es sein, dass eine Menge Informationen über mich trotzdem aufgesaugt worden wären, auch wenn ich möglicherweise nicht das direkte Ziel der Überwachungsorganisation war.

Sollte ich über dieses Eindringen in meine Privatsphäre empört sein? Ist jetzt endlich die Zeit von George Orwells 1984 angebrochen, wenn auch drei Jahrzehnte zu spät? Werde ich vom Großen Bruder beobachtet?

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Peter Singer

Writing for PS since 2001
227 Commentaries

Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, is Founder of the nonprofit organization The Life You Can Save. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), Rethinking Life and Death, The Point of View of the Universe, co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, The Most Good You Can Do, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, One World Now, Ethics in the Real World, Why Vegan?, and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction, also with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In April 2021, W.W. Norton published his new edition of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. In 2013, he was named the world's third "most influential contemporary thinker" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. He is a co-author (with Shih Chao-Hwei) of the forthcoming The Buddhist and the Ethicist (Shambhala Publications, December 2023).

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geoff ward Aug 5, 2013

It is so easy and fast to dice, slice and drill through metadata.
The information I lodged when registering with Project Syndicate gives easy access to my life history, my shopping habits, my spending patterns, my media usage, my use of trigger words, ... bomb, obama, osama ... there, we have moved from the scanning of metadata to positive surveillance of me by real shadowy people. GCHQ records are being cranked up and passed to the NSA.
They now know I have been anti-Blair, anti-Bush, anti-US, anti-corruption, in fact anti-almost everything that the USA actually DOES (as opposed to what it's Constitution says it should do).
I know that I am clogging up the work-loads of the millions of US citizens who are employed full-time in the US 'surveillance-game'; so be it.
It is imperative that 'the system' knows that there are millions of ordinary Joes who say "STOP, YOU HAVE GONE TOO FAR!"
The trouble is, the outrageous the intrusions, the more people that appear on the NSA radar, ... the more millions of US citizens are employed to scan and categorise us all. You, the tax-payers, pay for it all. Heaven forfend that the Government should waste your money - at least THAT is not against your Constitution!
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NIJAZ DELEUT KEMO Aug 3, 2013

Bravo professore !!!! SHAME ON YOU OBAMA !!!! For God sake do they have any brain? What they are thinking about the rest of US ?! This is the case for INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT, but, as always, U.S.A. is not a member or what... These days the story is finished. LA COMMEDIA E FINITA MY DEAR FELLOW AMERICANS. Ciao ragazzi. I do feel sorry for you, your democracy, freedom, justice, and...a lot of other very very important "things." Sincerely,
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Stephen R. Ganns Jul 19, 2013

Fredrick Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty, defined freedom in its purest form as: “The state in which a man (or a woman) is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others…” That should include explicit, implicit and rightly, potential coercion. The potential for coercion deriving from mass indiscriminate private data collection and the aggregation and storage thereof in one place by a government or any other entity leads to too much concentrated power and eventually spawns corrupt activity. The cycle has been repeated throughout history.
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Brent Beach Jul 19, 2013

I am quite surprised that a noted ethicist would adopt such a superficial position.

Acquiescing to the program because you have nothing to hide is a very short-sighted rational. Would you be similarly happy with a program that killed cats just because you have no cats. (Of course cats is a placeholder for any other thing or liberty.)

The lack of knowledge of and understanding of the uses of information massed as it has been by NSA should not blind you to the possibility that massed information can be a powerful asset.

Google masses information and makes use of it quite effectively. Why could NSA not be massing information (now or in the future) and using it even more effectively?

It is possible that analysis of massed anonymous information as collected by these systems could suggests trends in opinion or thought that would be more important to a central state wishing to control its people than any amount of much more personal information would be against individuals.

If you think this is not a problem, then you don't understand the issue.
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Tom Shillock Jul 19, 2013

For his "I don't really care" attitude towards NSA spying and for what I take to be his reason, I recommend that Peter Singer be awarded the Alfred E. Newman chair in philosophy at Princeton. An understanding of animal rights does not seem to have transferred well into human and political rights, especially an understanding of the nature of totalitarianism.
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Ed Grimley Jul 19, 2013

Does the NSA really produce anything? Does it really make us all safer? The best they could do is share all their programs and access with as many nations (everyone) as would be interested. Then the secrecy of spying will be equalized; then everyone can feel safer and allow everyone to build trust with one another.
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Foppe de Haan Jul 19, 2013

Considering that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover used to hover over anyone with left-leaning interests with tooth combs in the hopes of finding dirt, it appalls me that you are so complacent. See, e.g., http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/01/21/the-fbi-wrote-a-letter-to-martin-luther-king-telling-him-to-commit-suicide/
The suggestion that we need proof of this happening, when this kind of abuse is almost certain to lead to lots of activist careers being nipped in the bud (causing you to never find out how effective they might have become in the future) is therefore at best myopic.
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MK Anon Jul 19, 2013

the same tool that is used to detect terrorism can also be used to detect/control/blackmail/ .. anyone opposed to the NSA. Not finding anything about it means that they are good at keeping it secret.
As written here more than a million poeple have security privileges, and over that many years, ONE only came out in the press to say it. So given that they are extremely carefully, NSA would need tens of millions of blackmails to get one courageous man to say the truth (if they leave him alive long enough).
And be aware that anyone is black-mailable, either discussion tax evasion, extra-marital affaires, talkin about one's boss in rude ways, ect.. Worse, given the amount of data they have, I am sure the can predict the black-malleability of everyone, then they can measure the risk they take and the benefits they can get, either by convincing foreign politician to do some stuff, to be given market for american multinationals, to get access to more secrets on other people, ect..
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Foppe de Haan Jul 19, 2013

How on earth can you conclude that they are overreacting, when all you 'know' is that you don't consider the currently-released information threatening enough for the US govt to react in this fashion?
That aside, it wasn't just an 'insult to their dignity', it was also an almost-unprecedented (considering how many dictators have over the years gone to and from Switzerland and elsewhere) breach of the rules of diplomatic immunity; unless you believe that diplomats have more rights than heads of state when those heads of state are (by definition) on diplomatic missions when abroad.
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Leo Arouet Jul 14, 2013

No estoy de acuerdo... La recolección de datos es inaceptable desde cualquier punto de vista... Ningún país puede arrogarse ese derecho de espiar a los ciudadanos de ningún país...
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Michael Lynch Jul 8, 2013

I don't think anyone is outraged because they think the government will actually do something to them personally with the data that they are collecting. After all, like you said, it is only read by machines until something suspicious appears, and even then, the sheer volume of information would make it impossible to catch everything, so the majority of us have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Instead, they are angry over the principle of the matter. They were lead to believe their phone calls, emails etc. were private matters, and now it turns out that they are not. They feel deceived by their own government who spews out notions of "freedom" to win elections, while the government itself is impeding their freedom of privacy without them even knowing!

Surely this kind of hypocrisy and deception justifies being outraged.
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radek tanski Jul 8, 2013

America's reaction to the leaks just exposes that "democracy" is really only, and nothing more, than a population placation mechanism.

Now the leaks themselves have to be placated and everything will be back to normal.
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hari naidu Jul 6, 2013

The Patriot Act under which NSA gets its legal OK from FISA Court is apparently a rubber stamp decision-making legal court - judges appointed by Chief Justice Roberts - to hide actually what NSAs surveillance of individual privacy.

Today DOJ ordered FISA not to divulge its store of secret information because of their *sensitivity*.

What the hell does that mean? What are they afraid of?

This will end up being Obama's catastrophe legacy...and more.
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Shane Beck Jul 5, 2013

Any electronic communication should be considered unsecure (unless heavily encrypted). But part of the Cult of Secrecy is to cover up embarassing government mistakes. The numerous attempts to assassinate Castro come to mind.....
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Frank O'Callaghan Jul 5, 2013

The 'Big Brother' State is not interested in protecting its citizens but in protecting itself and serving its masters or controlling elite. Democracy has been degraded when the State spys on the populace. We have entered on the era of the Secret Police State.
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