The military industrial Google-plex
There's a tremendous swirl of activity about the DOJ Google motion. Concern over the NSA scandal continues, although the Administration has apparently made it a central initiative of W's second term. Spin!
What's interesting about this swirl of events is that we're using informational privacy as a proxy for our feelings of concern about the current Administration. We can't tag them on the Iraq war because there's too much to take in, but we can read FISA and say “aha!,” and we can read their request to Google and say “see?”
At the same time, it's alarming to our limited human consciousnesses that neither of these things would ordinarily have come to light. Only because the NYT finally decided to publish do we know about the NSA scandal, and only because Google fought back do we know about the COPA subpoena. So part of our (perhaps overheated) concern is our sense of complete lack of control over our environment.
And it's even worse than we fear. I'm certain that everything is surveilled these days; that book by Patrick Radden Keefe (Chatter), last year should have let everyone know that the NSA always wants everything. Maybe using Google as private police is new; maybe it's not. Maybe MSN and the others were also part of the NSA scandal, but we just don't know. We have no idea how much data about us is interesting to others, and we're scared by that.
So we talk about legislation as an immediate reaction — it's an attempt to exert control over our world.
A broad privacy law would have to encompass both offline and online data, and that's an enormous job. I doubt we'll do well at it. And the costs of such a one-size-fits-all approach would undoubtedly exceed whatever benefits (in terms of a sense of control over our world) we glean from it. It will never, ever, cover government use and collection of data. So we'll just be punishing the private sector. Let's try to control the little things (like, say, literacy and the recovery of New Orleans) before we try to control flows of information.