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300 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
The conversation that Snowden began is necessary for another
reason. The relentless growth of data-collection technology had
come to endanger personal privacy. Smart phones in our pockets,
GPS recorders in our cars, fitness bands on our wrists, CCTV moni-
tors in stores, and network-connected devices in our homes leave a
digital trail of every move we make. The government can subpoena
as part of an investigation, as we know, our personal data, including
our Internet searches, social media postings, electronic communica-
tions, and credit card records. In addition, the government has its
own tools of surveillance. Snowden, by disclosing that the govern-
ment was vacuuming in phone billing records and Internet activi-
ties, hit a sore spot in the public’s consciousness. How far did the
surveillance state extend? Did an Orwellian government intercept
private conversations of American citizens? Should Apple, Google,
and other Internet giants use a doomsday system of encryption to
prevent court-ordered searches for data? Were there adequate safe-
guards against government snooping?
In popular culture, surveillance is often associated with the sin-
© ister measures taken by a totalitarian government to suppress indi- ©
vidual dissidence. On television we see government agents in black
vans operating arrays of tape recorders, following people on the
street, and breaking into homes to steal files and tap telephone lines.
In the 2006 Academy Award-winning film The Lives of Others, for
example, East Germany’s Stasi police use listening devices to gather
information to blackmail intellectuals to assist in the eradication of
dissent. East Germany was not the only place in the Cold War era
using surveillance to suppress dissent. Even in the United States
in the 1950s and 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI bugged the phones
of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr, to root out
suspected subversive elements. Most Americans viewed this as a
reprehensible use of government surveillance, and the very men-
tion of the word, even before Snowden’s disclosure, evoked disquiet
among the public. But what Snowden exposed was not any sort of
rogue operation but programs authorized by the president and Con-
gress and approved by fifteen federal judges. If one accepts that the
nation’s security remains a legitimate function of government, the
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