White Suburban Soccer Moms Love NSA Surveillance

By Falguni A. Sheth

Why should they care if the government has their data? They don't fear becoming innocent targets of persecution.

 

Photo Credit: Flickr (cc)

June 16, 2013  |  

 

 

A frequent response of those untroubled by the revelations of the National Security Agency program is: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Perhaps we need to translate that phrase, along with the relative colorblindness through which the entire series of revelations has been scrutinized, as: “If your last name isn’t Khan, and you have no family in Pakistan/India/Iran, etc., you have nothing to fear.”
The revelations of NSA’s collection of “metadata” — as cybersecurity expert Susan Landau explained on “Democracy Now” — is, in fact, even more invasive than actual content collection. She gives an example of how that can be the case: Even if all the NSA does is trace the one or more calls from your home to your doctor on a day when you would normally be at work, followed by one or more calls from your phone that is now located at the doctor’s office to your family, that information strongly suggests that the content of the call was bad news.

Similarly then, if the NSA collects metadata of all calls and online traffic in the U.S., they are probably much less interested in a person living in New Paltz, N.Y., who calls Barcelona eight times a week than they are in biweekly calls from an Indo-Pak restaurant owner in Edison, N.J., to a “terrorist-heavy” locale in Pakistan — say, Waziristan. Clearly, in both cases, the pattern reveals the obvious: that both the New York and New Jersey residents have some connection to folks in the receiving nation. But what does it tell the NSA about who they are? To judge from the NSA’s data-mining project, the intensity of NSA surveillance is heavier in Pakistan than in Europe. Thus, even if the calls from New Paltz are to a terrorist cell in Barcelona, it seems more likely that the calls to Waziristan (say, to the restaurant owner’s mother and brother, and his family) will be more suspicious — of course due to the U.S.’s framing of where the War on Terror must be waged.  Still, the latter would be, as Marcy Wheeler discusses in a related issue, “false positives.”

What is the starting framework that informs the NSA to target your call? That folks with close/frequent connections to Pakistan should have their calls monitored? That these same folks have an increased likelihood of being terrorists/sympathizers? Or, alternately, that if one is an Iranian migrant, from a family that left sometime around the Revolution, yet retains close friends who work for the Iranian state (even as low-level civil servants), then their calls should be the subject of targeting (because as Dianne Feinstein has now announced, Iran is a terrorist state)? Or, as she has also stated, it allows the state to keep records of people who become terrorists later (à la “Minority Report”)?

I can hear the liberals now: “Of course, there she goes, making it all about race again.” Um, no. The NSA is making it about race/religion/ethnicity – as these are uniquely combined in the conceptual category of “Muslim Terrorists.” Other branches of the state have long established that terrorism is a unique category that, while defined race-neutrally as having to do with international or domestic political violence targeted against the U.S. government or its citizens, is almost uniquely and singularly applied to Muslims. We’ve seen evidence of this at other levels of government, as in the case of the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims (in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and internationally). Most recently, we saw this with the immediate rush to assume that a Saudi national that fled the Boston bomb blasts must have been the person who set them — before he was cleared the next day.
If this is the framework that underlies the massive dragnet, then I’m hardly the one making it about race. Meanwhile, as is so often the case, Marcy Wheeler and Rayne (writing at emptywheel.net) have each been presenting some of the most careful and detailed analysis of these programs. While the PRISM program is limited to collecting data from non-U.S. persons — and what that means is still unclear; does U.S. persons include non-citizen residents from India/Pakistan/Iran, etc., residing legally? — as Rayne asks:

Does this mean that all communications between individuals who do not have an Anglo-Saxon name are likely to be sniffed if not collected?

Does this sketchy “(foreign) + (less than 3 hops)” approach executed by humans explain known false-positives? Could the relationships between the false-positives be as tenuous as shopping at the same store? What happens in the case of targets possessing a highly common name like “Ahmed” — the equivalent of Smith in terms of frequency among Arabic surnames — in collection so large it could be called a dragnet?

As others have pointed out, some of these details are hardly new, although the names and scope of the program have changed. As far back as 2005 (yes, under an order signed by then-President Bush), USA Today was reporting details of the NSA’s data collection, warrantless wiretapping, and telecom companies turning over data to the feds. It’s also true that there was hullabaloo about it (though not as loud in mainstream media) by those who are labeled hardcore “privacy freaks” — folks like the ACLU, etc.  At some level, we may not have heard that much “new” information, but between Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and Glenn Greenwald, we now have unquestionable, tangible proof that the intelligence dragnet has been extensive and long-standing even after Bush’s executive order was rescinded.
Ultimately, the political celebration of NSA’s surveillance programs appears to rest on the same old tired flackery parroted by Sen. Lindsey Graham: “I don’t care if the NSA collects my data.”  Of course, Graham doesn’t care. Of course, DiFi thinks NSA data collection is crucial to catching terrorists. Of course, white suburban soccer moms are more interested in the intrigue of Snowden’s (ex?)girlfriend. Why should they care? They don’t worry that they will awake some morning and find themselves on the wrong side of the state — and certainly not because “they’re not doing anything wrong,” but rather because they’re not the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong family. (Remember former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki’s death? “He should have been born to a far more responsible father.”) But of course.

That’s why Lindsey Graham, DiFI and the white burbie housewives think that NSA surveillance is a great idea. They’re not politically vulnerable (OK, that’s an understatement). They’re officially in favor of the War on Terror. And certain under this administration and the previous one, their calls to the doctor and to family (or even Graham’s hypothetical call to Waziristan) are not registering as the “suspicious” activity that the NSA is looking for.

As I’ve said before, this all comes down to a familiar form of American privilege:

“[T]he privilege of not having to know (or know about) foreign nationals or feel particularly obliged to them, or know about the harms done to them, simply because the wars, jingoism, and aggressive foreign policy of the U.S. empire won’t affect you.”

The other side of the NSA leaks has to do with what we know or can infer about the profiles of people who get top-security clearance. If the NSA’s dragnet is designed to look for “suspicious” activity, then besides being directed toward foreigners and foreign threats, it should also be looking for people like Snowden (of course I’m not endorsing this; just considering the logic of the hunt): seeming “one of us” kinda guys — conservative, a believer in American ideals as decided and executed by the U.S. government, a former troop, a “regular guy” with top national security clearance. Who, as it turns out, doesn’t like what he is coming to learn in the course of his work, and is beginning to take serious issue with the size and scope of the project. Except that all the national security surveillance in the world didn’t catch him before he flew to Hong Kong to meet with reporters and turn over evidence of these secret slides that document an out-of-control surveillance program. Whoops.