The less-privacy-more-security doctrine is not only unprofitable but also cognitively untenable and contrary to constitutional entitlements
Our notions of privacy have become so irretrievably entangled with our notions of security that they form a yin and yang; two inseparable but antithetical extremes; the less of one means more of the other; chaos is the ascendancy of one over the other; harmony, a judicious and sublime balance between the two. Governments claim to preserve and leaders proclaim to seek this elusive equilibrium. "How much freedom should we forego in order to be safe?" former British PM David Cameron had asked, consolidating the impression that our safety solely depends on how much liberty we're willing to sacrifice, and the more we surrender, the safer we'll be.
This is an illusion. A sleight of hand that made us give up, without a whimper, all sorts of personal information to all sorts of agencies; let ourselves be watched by strangers, analysed and databased by geeks; strip-searched and retina-scanned by officious clerks. This is a semantic juggle that made us condone blatant trespass and insidious intrusion, and wheedled us to expect green grass and blue skies.
The privacy versus security set-up is a false dichotomy, a poser that forces a choice between two extremes, excluding all other possible alternatives, much like George Bush's "Either you are with us, or you're with the terrorists" gem, where neutrality as an alternative is cleverly denied. Faced with an ‘either-or' situation, our evolutionary instincts kick in to pick security over privacy, for, the latter being a social construct, has no bearing on survival. Then, before long, the story of the Arab and his camel will come to mind, and we'll become as imprudent as the Arab and as naked as the camel.
More importantly, by restricting security discourse to individual liberty, we deflect scrutiny from critical domains like intelligence sharing, coordination, analysis, training, equipment--the ‘denied alternatives' in the privacy-security polemic that actually make the difference to our security. It wasn't the lack of data or intelligence that let 9/11 happen, "It was a systematic failure of the way this country protects itself," said James Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence. "It's a fighter aircraft deployment failure. It's a foreign intelligence collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a visa and immigration policy failure." Successful terror attacks are consequences of systemic collapses, a collection of independent but interlinked lapses. Defence is only as good as the weakest link.
No ocean of metadata would have made a bolt action rifle morph into an AK 47, and no amount of wire-tapping would have made the NSG respond faster--two frontline failures--during the 2008 Mumbai attacks which occurred despite 11 warnings that hinted multiple, simultaneous attacks, 6 that indicated sea-borne infiltration, 3 that suggested Fidayeen attacks, and a couple that mentioned the Taj and Trident-Oberoi by name.
In a country where overtaxed policemen take public transport to reach crime scenes to fight hardened criminals with lathis, effective interception in cyberspace need not necessarily mean effective interception in real world.
The sweeping surveillance dragnet put in place following 9/11 in the US, and exposed by Edward Snowden, including the invasive ‘Total Information Awareness'--a preventive policing program that denudes every citizen to their bones--apparently have had negligible impact in preventing terror attacks, and played only marginal roles in unearthing terrorism related activities like funding. NSA Director Keith Alexander admitted to a Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013, that the bulk collection of telephone data had only prevented one known terrorist attack; and it was conventional methods like informants and routine law enforcement that led to more than 60% of terror investigations. Enough hard-edged evidence exists to indicate that the efficacy of electronic snooping is vastly exaggerated, and often misleading.
Though today's world hardly resembles colonial Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin's remark--"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"--points not only to the fallacy of hitching liberty with security but also to our self-destructive gullibility regarding matters of national security. We're quick to grant opportunistic governments unprecedented powers to intimately involve itself in our private lives, with no grasp of their effects on security. The Patriot Act, enacted in the wake of 9/11, seemed as reasonable to the Americans as the Enabling Act seemed to the Germans, which gave Hitler the power of life and death, decreed following the Reichstag fire of 1933. A frightened populace is easily manipulated.
The less-privacy-more-security doctrine is not only unprofitable but also cognitively untenable, because by extending the logic, the highest state of security has to be one of nil privacy, which, besides being contrary to constitutional entitlements, is an empirical impossibility. Indiscriminate surveillance is a classic example of a ‘security theatre'--a security action that's highly visible and thus gives the illusion of protection but doesn't produce actual results--like the seizure of cigarette lighters at airports. If we're seriously concerned about better security, what we need is not less privacy but increased awareness. Worse than being victims of terror is perhaps being victims of deception.
