Glenn Greenwald reports in the Guardian that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) has access to just about anything you do on the internet, your emails, chats, social networking updates, browsing history and so on. What gives the NSA this “widest-reaching” data collection capability is a program called XKeyscore.
It is always possible to put a positive spin something most galling. Look at it this way. The NSA is now the world's largest data backup service. Next time you lose a file, any file, you can be sure where to find its backup. In fact, given its massive data storage capacity the NSA should consider creating a business venture on the side.
Now that I know that potentially someone at the NSA might be tracking anything and everything I do online, I feel strangely liberated. I am not vain enough to think that being a seasoned journalist I am under active surveillance. However, it is not entirely inconceivable that one has been monitored once in a while. If there is active surveillance on, given the smallness of my data everything may already have been copied from my computer. Perhaps even this post is getting simulwritten (Not a word but coined here) at some parallel NSA system as a matter of routine. Who knows?
For someone like me whose private and public online lives are almost entirely identical there is nothing to hide. I say almost because there ought to be areas of discrepancy or gaps that exist without my being conscious about them. But even there the intent is not to conceal anything. So if the NSA wants to mine my data it is welcome to. In fact, to make it easy I can copy everything to whichever system they want me to on a daily basis.
I suspect most people have nothing to hide. If they object to being monitored, it is not because they lead a life of great incrimination. They object on the sound ground of principle. They have every right not to be swept up as part of some massively complex and terribly intrusive government program. The US government insists that there are very strict restrictions in place to ensure that the monitoring system is not vulnerable to abuse. One can counter that assertion saying that if there is a live human being at the other end of the surveillance, sitting in some obscure high-tech office, there is always the possibility of abuse.
Presuming that the NSA knows everything because of XKeyscore and has known it for sometime now, I wonder whether any scaling down of that surveillance and monitoring would make a material difference in the near future. Are we as ordinary citizens locked in a losing battle with the national security state that has grown to varying degrees around the world? The idea that someone might be watching you is certainly creepy. The question is whether we can do anything about it. I personally doubt if these capabilities will ever be rolled back. The national security state, which has a vested interest in such capabilities, will find newer ways to keep them alive.
There is already so much data that has been collected on large parts of the global population that unless we add another seven billion people who are outside the reach of such intrusion, we are pretty much locked in for the foreseeable future.
One can safely assume that most people who are online are engaged in generally acceptable/ignorable social conduct because if they are not, then we have a much greater crisis than just our privacy being overrun. By generally acceptable/ignorable social conduct, I also mean watching porn videos with titles such as “My horny teenage friend grinds my sleeping father.”