Posted
on August 19, 2013
Ben Adida
http://benlog.com/2013/08/19/letter-to-president-obama-on-surveillance-and-freedom/
Dear President
Obama,
My name is Ben
Adida. I am 36, married, two kids, working in Silicon Valley as a software
engineer with a strong background in security. I’ve worked on the security of
voting systems and health systems, on web browsers and payment systems. I
enthusiastically voted for you three times: in the 2008 primary and in both
presidential elections. When I wrote about my
support for your campaign five years ago, I said:
In his campaign, Obama
has proposed opening up to the public all bill debates and negotiations with
lobbyists, via TV and the Internet. Why? Because he trusts that Americans, when
given the tools to see and understand what their legislators are doing, will
apply pressure to keep their government honest.
I gushed about
how you supported transparency as broadly as possible, to enable better
decision making, to empower individuals, and to build a better nation.
Now, I’m no
stubborn idealist. I know that change is hard and slow. I know you cannot steer
a ship as big as the United States as quickly as some would like. I know tough
compromises are the inevitable path to progress.
I also imagine
that, once you’re President, the enormity of the threat from those who would
attack Americans must be overwhelming. The responsibility you feel, the level
of detail you understand, must make prior principles sometimes feel quaint. I
cannot imagine what it’s like to be in your shoes.
I also remember
that you called on us, your supporters, to stay active, to call you and
Congress to task. I want to believe that you asked for this because you knew
that your perspective as Commander in Chief would inevitably become skewed. So
this is what I’m doing here: I’m calling you to task.
You are failing
hard on transparency and oversight when it comes to NSA surveillance. This failure is not the pragmatic
compromise of Obamacare, which I strongly support. It is not the sheer
difficulty of closing Guantanamo, which I understand. This failure is deep. If
you fail to fix it, you will be the President principally responsible for the
effective death of the Fourth Amendment and worse.
mass surveillance
The specific
topic of concern, to be clear, is mass surveillance. I am not concerned with
targeted data requests, based on probable cause and reviewed individually by
publicly accountable judges. I can even live with secret data requests,
provided they’re very limited, finely targeted, and protect the free-speech
rights of service providers like Google and Facebook to release appropriately
sanitized data about these requests as often as they’d like.
What I’m
concerned about is the broad, dragnet NSA signals intelligence recently
revealed by Edward Snowden. This kind of surveillance is a different beast,
comparable to routine frisking of every individual simply for walking down the
street. It is repulsive to me. It should be repulsive to you, too.
wrong in practice
If you’re a
hypochondriac, you might be tempted to ask your doctor for a full body MRI or
CT scan to catch health issues before detectable symptoms. Unfortunately,
because of two simple probabilistic principles, you’re much worse off if you
get the test.
First, it is
relatively unlikely that a random person with no symptoms has a serious medical
problem, ie the prior probability is low. Second, it is quite possible — not
likely, but possible — that a completely benign thing appears potentially
dangerous on imaging, ie there is a noticeable chance of false positive. Put
those two things together, and you get this mind-bending outcome: if the
full-body MRI says you have something to worry about, you actually don’t have
anything to worry about. But try convincing yourself of that if you get a scary
MRI result.
Mass
surveillance to seek out terrorism is basically the same thing: very low prior
probability that any given person is a terrorist, quite possible that normal
behavior appears suspicious. Mass surveillance means wasting tremendous
resources on dead ends. And because we’re human and we make mistakes when given
bad data, mass surveillance sometimes means badly hurting innocent people, like
Jean-Charles
de Menezes.
So what happens
when a massively funded effort has frustratingly poor outcomes? You get scope
creep: the surveillance apparatus gets redirected to other purposes. The TSA
starts overseeing sporting events. The DEA and IRS dip into the NSA dataset.
Anti-terrorism laws with far-reaching powers are used to intimidate
journalists and their loved ones.
Where does it
stop? If we forgo due process for a certain category of investigation which, by
design, will see its scope broaden to just about any type of investigation, is
there any due process left?
wrong on principle
I can imagine
some people, maybe some of your trusted advisors, will say that what I’ve just
described is simply a “poor implementation” of surveillance, that the NSA does
a much better job. So it’s worth asking: assuming we can perfect a surveillance
system with zero false positives, is it then okay to live in a society that
implements such surveillance and detects any illegal act?
This has always
felt wrong to me, but I couldn’t express a simple, principled, ethical reason
for this feeling, until I spoke with a colleague recently who said it better
than I ever could:
For society to
progress, individuals must be able to experiment very close to the limit of the
law and sometimes cross into illegality. A society which perfectly enforces its
laws is one that cannot make progress.
What would have
become of the civil rights movement if all of its initial transgressions had
been perfectly detected and punished? What about gay rights? Women’s rights? Is
there even room for civil disobedience?
Though we want
our laws to reflect morality, they are, at best, a very rough and sometimes
completely broken approximation of morality. Our ability as citizens to occasionally
transgress the law is the force that brings our society’s laws closer to our
moral ideals. We should reject mass surveillance, even the theoretically
perfect kind, with all the strength and fury of a people striving to form a
more perfect union.
patriots
Mr. President,
you have said that you do not consider Edward Snowden a patriot, and you have
not commented on whether he is a whistleblower. I ask you to consider this: if
you were an ordinary citizen, living
your life as a Law Professor at the University of Chicago, and you found out,
through Edward Snowden’s revelations, the scope of the NSA mass surveillance
program and the misuse of the accumulated data by the DEA and the IRS, what
would you think? Wouldn’t you, like many of us, be thankful that Mr. Snowden
risked his life to give we the people this information, so that we may judge
for ourselves whether this is the society we want?
And if there is
even a possibility that you would feel this way, given that many thousands do,
if government insiders believe Snowden to be a traitor while outsiders believe
him to be a whisteblower, is that not all the information you need to realize
the critical positive role he has played, and the need for the government to
change?
the time to do
something is now
I still believe
that you are, at your core, a unique President who values a government by and
for the people. As a continuing supporter of your Presidency, I implore you to
look deeply at this issue, to bring in outside experts who are not involved in
national security. This issue is critical to our future as a free nation.
Please do what
is right so that your daughters and my sons can grow up with the privacy and
dignity they deserve, free from surveillance, its inevitable abuses, and its
paralyzing force. Our kids, too, will have civil rights battles to fight. They,
too, will need the ability to challenge unjust laws. They, too, will need the
space to make our country better still.
Please do not
rob them of that opportunity.
Sincerely,
Ben Adida
