[privacy] The Spitzer Case and the National Surveillance State

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/03/spitzer-case-and-national-surveillance.ht
ml

Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin writes
<http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/03/spitzer-case-and-national-surveillance.h
tml>  on Spitzer and the national surveillance state:

...The Spitzer story shows both the promise and the threat of these
developments. On the one hand, reporting financial transactions makes the
job of law enforcement easier, and it uncovers crimes (and terrorist plots)
that might never be discovered otherwise. Mandatory disclosure (or in this
case, voluntary disclosure by banks) of private individual's financial
transactions, and sharing of data between intelligence services, federal,
state and local law enforcement helps the state identify patterns of
criminal activity, prevent crimes before they occur, and punish them after
the fact. These techniques and technologies allow governments to do the jobs
entrusted to them more powerfully and more efficiently than ever before.

On the other hand, these developments carry all of the potential risks of a
powerful National Surveillance State: Governments can make mistakes in
assessing levels of criminality and dangerousness; and their data mining
models may characterize innocent activity as suspicious. Without sufficient
oversight and checking functions, government actors may misuse the
additional knowledge they gain, for example, by instigating abusive
prosecutions, or creating discriminatory systems for access to public and
private services (like banks, airports, government entitlements and so on).
And the more powerful government becomes in knowing what its citizens are
doing, the easier it becomes for government to control people's behavior.

These issues arise in the case of money transactions for prostitution, but
they could easily have arisen in a wide range of other circumstances. The
practices of financial disclosure and the technologies of surveillance can
be adapted to many different ends, some noble, others less so.

Whether you like or fear the National Surveillance state, it is not a utopia
or dystopia of the future; it is already here. It is the way we will govern
and be governed in the years ahead. Spitzer's crime is his own; the
techniques of surveillance, collation and analysis that caught him are ours
and they will be applied to all of us.

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