In a 2006 academic paper partially funded by the NSA's ARDA program (now called the Disruptive Technology Office), the authors showed how social networks could be used to identify conflicts of interest among academic peer reviewers. The ARDA project, called "An Ontological Approach to Financial Analysis & Monitoring," seems to have been dedicated to keeping tabs on money flows and money laundering around the world (this was the pre-Bitcoin era). "Although social networks can provide data to detect COI," the authors write, "one important problem lies in the lack of integration among sites hosting them. Moreover, privacy concerns prevent such sites from openly sharing their data."Those privacy concerns—about the things we keep in our drawers and the "things" we keep in our inboxes—find their legal protection in the Fourth Amendment:THE MOST THOROUGH LIBRARIES OF PERSONAL DATA EVER BUILT ARE BEING BUILT BY US EVERYDAY. NOW THEY'RE THE MOST POPULAR WEBSITES ON THE INTERNET.
Now that nearly every real-world activity gets turned into data, somehow, somewhere, we're all being spied upon. We're all spies too, if not as potential data points in some software's network analysis, then as its sensors, the uploaders of photos and videos, the writers of emails and tweets, all feeding the big beast of data. The irony of all this personal data collection of course is that we don't ourselves often have it or control it; legally, it's not clear who even "owns" it. Despite the preponderance of data, we're ignorant about exactly where that data is going.The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
But even as we expect law enforcement to look out for own rights and not break the law, we also know—even if we don't always acknowledge it—that governments do ugly things in the name of security. Are those things justified? What counts as illegal or suspicious? In cases where we might think access to this data is reasonable (foiling a terrorist plot), how much do we want to know? How much do we want revealed about our government's secrets? How do we police those secret things? The questions impinge upon the trials of leakers like Bradley Manning—one of a record number of whistleblowers being prosecuted by the Justice Department—but also on the "secret" things those leakers expose, like extraordinary renditions and signature strikes by drones.Put another way: if we already expect that our governments keep and sometimes steal secrets—among other controversial things—in the name of safety and security, what do we have to say about how that's done? And if it relates to us, our personal and private information—and it has for a long time—what will we have to say about how that data is used? If we thought that it was helpful for spotting would-be terrorists, would we consent to the government using that data to create its own private Facebooks? If we're already signed up for the nanny state, like some secret social network, are there ways of opting-out of part of it? How can we tweak our NSA privacy settings?"We are overseen by everybody," said the NSA director. "And I will tell you that those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is absolutely false."