For once, newscasts over the northern summer contained real news. Of course, it had long been suspected that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spies on citizens and foreigners at home and abroad. The news, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, is that evidence now stares us in the face.

The NSA collects telephone data on millions of Americans, provided by phone companies such as Verizon. And a system called Prism gives the NSA and FBI access to Internet companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Non-Americans outside the U.S. are tracked by Prism. As is often the way with leaks, they continue. But what do they mean? Why are they important? And who cares?

The Snowden leaks draw attention to three prominent trends in surveillance.

One, governments undertake mass surveillance on their own citizens. Not just careful, targeted surveillance of suspects but blanket surveillance of any citizen, whether or not he or she has committed a crime. The NSA system, for instance, can capture and watch 75 per cent of all U.S. Internet traffic, including foreigners’ communications. Since most Canadian Internet traffic travels through American network cables, that includes our communications. Ordinary citizens find themselves under the magnifying glass as calls, texts, emails and searches are subject to systematic snooping.

Two, corporations share their “own” data supplies with government with mutual benefit. You think police have the edge with face-recognition technology or profiling? No way. Facebook dwarfs such systems. Tagging seems like fun but feeds the advertisers. And marketing data also feed into surveillance conducted by government agencies. No wonder the NSA teams with Internet companies. But it means that government departments are not alone in monitoring groups and individuals; it’s a complex partnership.

Three, ordinary citizens unwittingly co-operate by supplying raw data through mundane, everyday Internet use. Just using the net to communicate means you can be watched. “Deep Packet Inspection” enables Internet carriers to monitor “headers” (with the address) and sometimes content, along with “metadata” of time-and-place and message length on all users.

Some dismiss such metadata as being “like a phone book” but actually, mass analysis makes metadata very revealing. The fact that “mere” metadata also seems trivial to users inhibits questioning such practices.

But asking questions is long overdue. Fears fanned by 9/11 “security” and the fun fostered by Facebook distracts us from what’s really going on: the surveillance playing field now tilts perilously in favour of large organizations and away from individuals and groups. Such surveillance undermines our relationship as citizens to the state — we may naively comply but we didn’t consent.

Internet companies, too, should be hearing from us. It’s not just that someone might find out things about us that they have no need to know — important though that is — it’s that government and corporations intercept and analyze our data, sorting us into categories for differential treatment. Can you name your threat-risk assessment (TRA) at CSIS or your postal-code-based consumer segment? No. But those classifications can make a big difference to your actual choices and life chances.

Who will ask these questions and more? It isn’t just a matter of “catching up” with new technology, although recognizing that Canadian law lags pathetically behind reality would be a start. It’s also about why technological potential is permitted to become political destiny, why everyone has become a suspect and why organizations are so resistant to calls for accountability for sensitive personal information.

Canada, blessed with much better personal data protection than many other countries and a long history of innovative thinking about communications, could still take the lead in reversing the trend toward unwarranted and disproportionate surveillance. The so-called digital era is not self-propelling, nor is it inevitably destructive of trust or care for vulnerable groups.

It’s up to us to keep up the pressure for answers and, more important, for public debate on surveillance today. There’s already a palpable groundswell. One key site for information is SecretSpying.ca.

David Lyon is director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University. His newest book (with Zygmunt Bauman) is Liquid Surveillance (2013).

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