I read
Digital Fortress only recently and it’s almost remarkable that the timing of
this coincided with the NSA scandal that is making front-page news globally. The ethical conundrum that was presented in
the book is still as relevant in the World as we see it today (it is still the
core of various science fiction stories out there) and there will always be
supporters of this argument on either side: you know that you need to cross
some line to fix some wrongs but when do you know you have crossed a line that
you shouldn't have? When do you know you have ‘too much’ power?
I don’t
think that this is about the striking of balance between privacy rights and
national security as its being made out to be. Hell, consumer privacy died a
long while ago (once we created our social media profiles and became active
users online) and in this case it’s only the US government that is potentially breaching
user privacy. That should be the least of our worries. In fact, I would be more
worried about the amount of consumer data that a private corporation like a Google
or a Facebook has. In fact Ashley Mayer’s
tweet at the end of the Google keynote at its recently held IO conference that has
since become famous had this to say:
Of course,
in the Middle East, people have been jailed for saying things that the
Government didn't want them to say and we know that there is a certain level of
internet censorship in countries such as China and India, but for the rest of
the western World, the internet is still a free forum as we know it. So
according to me, for the most part of, we should be more worried about the
power the private organizations have today and that it’s not about the breach
of privacy anymore but the ability of these organizations to influence our
lives and control our behavior in a way that works best for these
organizations.
Coming back
to my initial line of thinking: the moot point is not about the current US
government’s ability to snooping in on our online activities but the potential
power that this ability could give to someone who could misuse it for private
gain. For example, if an autocratic power somehow got control of the PRISM
program today, they could do the actual harm that we are all afraid of today. However, at the very same time, if the US
government is to be believed, the PRISM web traffic surveillance program has contributed
in helping prevent more than 45 potential terrorist attacks (with at least 10
of them in the US). So therefore this
program has been a force for good. However, this power in the wrong hands could
wreak havoc and therefore the question still remains: you had to cross a line to fix some wrongs
but when do you know that you have crossed a line you shouldn't have? When do
you know you have ‘too much’ power? The verdict is still out there. All I know
is that the Internet must be protected from being controlled, irrespective of
whether it’s a government or a large corporation and that is what exactly
Internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee also has to say.
