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Tech

We Are All the NSA Now

How our obsession with Snowden proves the online public is just as big a snoop as we imagine the NSA to be.
Image: Flickr

At the very least, Edward Snowden has done us a powerful public service. Whether or not you agree with his decision to leak top-secret NSA documents to the press, it's impossible to deny that he has jump-started an important discussion about the role that state surveillance should play in our daily lives.

We bristled at the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping, courtesy of the Patriot Act, and we cultivated a generally vague, disconcerting sense that the government was peeping our data. But we never imagined the NSA was collecting records of every single one of our cell phone calls. Or was actively storing our emails, tweets, status updates, and Skype sessions, as long as their algorithms felt we were conducting them with "foreign entities."

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Now we know they are, and at least half of the nation is outraged. The other half's at least a little creeped out. But there's a pertinent parallel to this discussion about government spying that should probably also be discussed: With a minimal amount of effort, any member of the public with internet access can get ahold of much of the same personal information that the monolithic, all-seeing National Security Agency can. The web-browsing public is almost as powerful an online spy as the NSA. For proof, look no further than Snowden himself.

I already know more about Edward Snowden, a man who I have never met—and who appears to have consciously deleted his social media profiles (if they ever existed)—than the person currently sitting next to me in the office. Sure, I've read the comments he made in his interview with the Guardian. But the broad philosophical statements published there aren't why I feel like I know Snowden so intimately. No, I know these details about Snowden's personal life from old online company bios, from lengthy comments he left on tech sites, from his (ex?) girlfriend's tweets and blog posts.

I know that he has an old lover whom he misses very much. I know that he owns a gun. I know that he has participated in online political activism focused on 4th Amendment rights. I know he once proclaimed a penchant for "beautiful, nubile women." I know that he has had, in his own words, "sex marathons from sundown til sunrise." I know that he has described his penis as a "man-totem." I know that he wants to move to Japan or Thailand or maybe Australia. I know his girlfriend is a dancer who enjoys pole-dancing. I know that she writes a blog. I know that she likes to go on hikes, and that she affects an air of whimsicality.

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I know they spent romantic afternoons together lying around in an empty room.

And going to the beach.

You're getting the point. All of this is intensely personal stuff. They're details most of us would be pretty uncomfortable letting some stranger from the government pore over. They're the kind of things that make us we cringe when we imagine the government peering into our lives. It seems pretty embarrassing to publish them, even on this strictly non-governmental website.

And yet we submit this data to the public sphere willingly. We overshare. Snowden disclosed details about his sex life on an Ars Technica comment board under a user name easily decoded by some quick Googling. His girlfriend tweeted out those Instagrammed photos to her hundreds of followers.

This isn't a jab at either of them—this is just what we all do now, without thinking. Of course, most of us aren't responsible for one of the most significant leaks of classified information in history. Nobody has cause to comb through our Facebook profiles, our tweets, our blog comments, our Reddit posts, our Instagrams, we reason, or to publish them on popular websites—but they could if they wanted to.

Snowden's example shows us as much: even though he shut down any Twitter or Facebook or Reddit account he might have had, all it took was some determined internet searching for bloggers and web journalists to uncover a trove of details about his personal life. Anyone with a blog can be just as intrusive as we imagine the NSA to be.

Case in point: Even though I've lost faith in my ability to navigate Facebook's labyrinthine privacy settings—and thus post only what I assume will be viewed by advertising firms and other prying eyes—I've still posted things that would make me squirm if I knew government bureaucrats were poring over them. I've left comments on blogs that I wouldn't want future employers to see. And the state can access any of that material just as easily as a Reuters journalist or a Buzzfeed blogger.

Now, the leaks reveal that there are larger problems with how the state might using our data, because its methods are currently hidden from the public. Obviously, we expect a certain degree of privacy with personal correspondence like emails—but who among us is familiar with Google's current Gmail security policies? And of course it's impossible for the public to track cell phone call records of strangers on a regular basis.

Furthermore, when we think of Orwellian or Brazil-esque situations—the government either clamping down on speech or mishandling personal information—we need to remember that much of the data we might worry about the state analyzing, we have already voluntarily made a matter of public record.

These leaks are hugely important. But let's not just fret over what the state is privately gathering—let's consider the long trail of data we are constantly and willingly making public. If we think the government shouldn't be sifting through our personal data, maybe we shouldn't be uploading it to Facebook.