Why Would The Government Want to Spy On Me?

By Logan Robinson



After all the debating over privacy rights violation, justification, and the technical hows of government spying, there is one question to answer: why? Glenn Sulmasy of CNN argues here that the U.S. government’s motivation for collecting information on individuals is genuinely about protecting the citizens from “Jihadists”. But considering the U.S. government has a lot to lose here, it’s a little naive to take their explanation blindly. Let’s go a little deeper.

Either the agents in charge of spying operations have no idea how to profile a terrorist or they’re just not looking for terrorists. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that people don’t tend to talk about their diabolical plans for overthrowing government or flying planes into buildings in online multiplayer fantasy games like World of Warcraft. Yet government spying is also taking place there. Closer to home and almost as absurd is the NSA’s Xbox Live data collecting practices from tracking locations to monitoring audio channels between game players.

With the NSA tapping into the phone records of millions of U.S. citizens and countless more in other countries, mining information on individuals through Facebook and social networking sites, and gaining access to emails of users of Google and Yahoo, it’s bewildering to think even supercomputers might sort through it efficiently enough to come up with useful leads. Quite bewildering indeed. In fact, data sorting programs that are suspected to be used in these vast spying operations actually create false connections or see patterns where there are none. Each series of connections the program finds is marked to be reviewed by a real human being (if you consider NSA agents human beings). This means that in order to find terrorists, real people have to use time, money, and resources chasing down tens of thousands of leads that turn out to be useless false connections. Even with a program that could recognized patterns and connections in vast amounts of data with more discretion, the underlying assumption from which the NSA works, that terrorists have a consistent data profile, isn’t anywhere near agreed-upon. Simply put, this method of searching for terrorists seems horrendously inefficient.

The original number of acts of terrorism thwarted by your altruistic friends at the National Security Agency was greatly exaggerated. You likely heard the number to be 54. It turns out that there was exactly one criminal conviction of terrorism that came about by the violation of your 4th amendment civil rights. A cab driver named Basaaly ­Moalin sent 8500 dollars to an extremist group with ties to Al-Qaeda. You can see that it is inefficient both in in theory and practice.

Now, we have that the NSA is searching in suspiciously irrelevant places and its terrorist search is wildly ineffective. It is therefore not unreasonable to think that the motivation, or at the very least the result, of government spying is not only to search for terrorists. The NSA has shared the information it collects with the DEA and the FBI to help with their investigation of suspects at home. It has gone even gone on the offensive and attacked its targets. Whatever the initial cause of spying was, it appears now that it is being used to enhance the oppressive capabilities of other branches and bureaucracies and to bring us twenty steps closer to a dystopian police state.

So why does the U.S. government want to spy on you? Simply put, because it understands that information is power and anyone can be a liability.

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