“We’ve had tremendous intelligence failures,” Snowden said, “because we’re monitoring the Internet, everybody’s communications, instead of suspects‘ communications, and that’s caused us to miss leads that could have helped us.”
Well, my days of not taking Fast Eddie Snowden seriously are certainly coming to a middle. In today’s SXSWI knob-slobber, a bunch of paste-eaters went crazy for a line that basically conveys the same sensibility as the middle-aged white women who were flabbergasted at being asked to take their Manolos off going through the security line at BWI in October 2001. Why are you searching us? Search the brown people! Search the foreigners! Search the terrorists!
But setting aside the propensity of well-to-do white nerds for profiling-based solutions to crime, Snowden’s other argument falls flat too – which is that there is a technological solution to technological surveillance. That’s where he’s flat wrong. There’s not. Oh, sure, you can run GPG on all your mail and never connect except through Tor and eschew iOS and Android for some sort of hand-crafted phone you build yourself from an Arduino-clone, but it’s the same thing that keeps glibertarians with nine assault rifles thinking they can somehow stand up to the federal government. The asymmetry is just too great. What’s going to save you from the evil eye of Big Brother is not shooting back or building a better cloaking device. You’ll be saved when Big Brother is no longer socially acceptable.
And that’s the thing: we as a society privileged catching the horrible evil superhuman Magneto terrorists above little things like privacy, and we did it for years. There was one vote – one – against the PATRIOT Act when it passed, and that Senator has long since been turfed out of office in favor of another paint-by-numbers Teatard. People don’t care about privacy. If they did, Facebook wouldn’t still have a half-billion users despite whoring your data out as if it were Miley Cyrus. Doctors who constantly hear about the legal peril of HIPAA data loss wouldn’t still be forwarding their mail into Gmail for convenience. AT&T would have paid some sort of price for the revelation eight years ago that they were routinely sending everything to the NSA.
I know that everyone at Nerding Man is convinced that they are the next wave of human evolution, and God knows I think I’m superior to 99% of the human race, but guess what? The rest of the human race still exists and votes. It’s not enough if everybody on your app.net client is in favor of strong encryption and robust privacy protection if Ed Earl Brown doesn’t give a shit. And right now, he doesn’t, because he doesn’t think he has anything to hide and he wants terrorists to be killed, and the fact that he doesn’t see it working isn’t going to make him think we have to pull the plug.
It should be obvious, but apparently it’s not: you can’t fix cultural issues with technical solutions.