Both Liberals and Conservatives Share Concerns About Stepped Up Surveillance

As Americans hurtle at full speed into the next millennium, individuals must confront the ever expanding impact of technology in everyday life.

Technology creeps up on society.  People gradually accept more technology as necessary almost without realizing it.  Gadgets stealthily grow into necessities.  They make the world easier and some cannot remember how they did without them.  In this way, surveillance cameras make life easier for intelligence and law enforcement.  But at what price to individual liberty?

Jan Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, argues that officials need to look at the effects of constant surveillance on civil societies in Eastern Europe under Communism.  He writes that:

They cite, for example, a memoir by Kati Marton about growing up in Budapest during the 1950s. Marton’s father, a reporter for the Associated Press, and her mother, a reporter for UPI, suspected but did not know that the government was monitoring them (documents later showed it was). And they never knew precisely how or when any surveillance was taking place. Yet this was enough to prompt them to take extensive measures to guard against such spying, and cast a pall of suspicion over their lives.
Marton’s father, for example, routinely felt he had to take evasive maneuvers when driving to make sure nobody was following him, and suspected that his children’s nanny was a spy for the government. Her mother was afraid to use the telephone, and even ripped it from the wall lest it be used by the government as a microphone even when no call was taking place.

Stanley does not compare law enforcement tactics of American police forces to those of the infamous Stasi, but says that the effect of constant surveillance can be debilitating on society as a whole.

Heritage Foundation last month expressed similar concerns about the possible uses of unmanned drones over American soil.  Since drones can be relatively small and quiet, they are much less detectable than, for example, a helicopter. 

At Heritage, the main concerns lay with possible interference with privacy rights and potential abuse by law enforcement.  This is a subtle, but important difference from Stanley's argument.  Although there are "acceptable domestic uses," Heritage argues that the law must establish guidelines before deployment of surveillance drones.  They assert that:

• No fundamental liberty guaranteed by the Constitution can be breached or infringed upon.
• Any increased intrusion on American privacy interests must be justified through an understanding of the particular nature, significance, and severity of the threat addressed by the program. The less significant the threat, the less justified the intrusion.
• The full extent and nature of the intrusion worked by any new technology must be understood and appropriately limited. Not all intrusions are justified simply because they are effective. Strip searches at airports would certainly prevent people from boarding planes with weapons, but they would do so at too high a cost.
• Whatever the justification for the intrusion, if there are less intrusive means of achieving the same end at a reasonably comparable cost, the less intrusive means ought to be preferred. There is no reason to erode Americans’ privacy when equivalent results can be achieved without doing so.
• Any new system that is developed and implemented must be designed to be tolerable in the long term. The war against terrorism, uniquely, is one with no foreseeable end. Thus, excessive intrusions may not be justified as emergency measures that will lapse upon the termination of hostilities. Policymakers must be restrained in their actions; Americans might have to live with their consequences for a long time.

From these general principles one can derive certain other, more concrete conclusions regarding the development and construction of any new technology—principles that are directly relevant to the deployment of drones domestically:

• No new system should alter or contravene existing legal restrictions on the government’s ability to access data about private individuals. Any new system should mirror and implement existing legal limitations on domestic or foreign activity, depending on its sphere of operation.
• Similarly, no new system should alter or contravene existing operational system limitations. Development of new technology is not a basis for authorizing new government powers or new government capabilities. Any such expansion should be justified independently.
• No new system that materially affects citizens’ privacy should be developed without specific authorization by the American people’s representatives in Congress and without provisions for their oversight of the operation of the system.
• Finally, no new system should be implemented without the full panoply of protections against its abuse. As James Madison told the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788, “There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”[6]

 Both Heritage and the ACLU, normally at odds, understand that a "surveillance society" comes at the cost of rights, liberty, and quality of life.  Governments must weigh the issues carefully before subjecting citizens to it.

ACLU

Heritage