State Secrets and Surveillance
Hot on the heels of the Obama administration’s offering State secrets as a basis for the dismissal of a lawsuit over its targeting of a U.S. citizen for killing, U.S. officials are proposing a bill that would, according to the New York Times, “require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order.” The State must have its secrets in order to keep us safe, but it must have access to our private communications if officials deem it necessary to survey them for our security. And that assumes the officials doing the surveillance have our safety and best interests at heart, and assumption unwise to make.
It gets worse. Julian Sanchez adds: “if I understand it correctly, the proposal would insist on a centralized (and therefore less secure) architecture for secure communications, as opposed to an end-to-end model where encryption is handled client-side. In effect, the government is insisting on the right to make a macro-design choice between competing network models for thousands of companies.” A Salvific State must be a Surveillance State, and a Surveillance State must control the surveillance technology. Sanchez notes some other problems with the proposal, at least insofar as we understand it. The bill isn’t yet a bill, and I hope it never will be.
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