The Problem Is the Oversight, Not the NSA's Data Gathering

So now it has been revealed: the U.S. National Security Agency may know as much about you as Google does.

Google (and Facebook, and other Internet companies) use this information to better target ads and services. The NSA is out to find people on the verge of doing bad things.

That private companies and governments are doing this shouldn't be a surprise at this point. This is the promise of big data, after all. To cite two authorities:

We can measure and therefore manage more precisely than ever before. We can make better predictions and smarter decisions. We can target more-effective interventions, and can do so in areas that so far have been dominated by gut and intuition rather than by data and rigor.

Yes, the availability of all this data about how we communicate, what we buy, and how we do our jobs may feel a little disconcerting, or creepy. But it also delivers all sorts of good things: excellent free e-mail and document-storage services; new ways to connect to people and find products we might want; better-managed companies; a stronger economy. And yeah, maybe it helps catch a terrorist here or there.

The issue really isn't whether companies or governments should partake of these data riches — of course they should. As pundit David Frum put it on Twitter today, "An advanced society is vulnerable to terrorist attack in many ways. Why throw away its technological advantage?"

What is an issue is how the data is gathered and used. What are the rules of the game for the big data revolution?

On the private-enterprise side, the reality is that there aren't any clear rules yet. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple keep adjusting their practices in ways that are mostly opaque to users. There's a movement to rein these companies in while retaining the benefits of big data by shifting the ownership of data to individuals and the management of it to a new set of "vendor relationship" service providers. The Obama administration has been pushing a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," and others urge even stronger protections. But the momentum of the current company-dominated approach is strong.

When it comes to government, there actually are rules and procedures in the U.S. for determining what sort of surveillance is permissible. The problem is that the structure set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is so shrouded in secrecy that it's pretty much impossible for anyone outside the security establishment to monitor what's being done. Security insider Edward Snowden decided to leak details of the NSA's operations in part because he didn't think the rules and procedures were strong enough. "The only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state [is] policy," he told The Guardian. "Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law." Policies can change without notice, Snowden continued, leading to the potential for "turnkey tyranny."

That's meant to be alarming, and it is alarming. If Snowden's revelations lead to a real debate over how the U.S. security state is governed, that'll be great. But outrage over the NSA's surveillance programs isn't going to stop the exploding availability of data about our lives — and it probably shouldn't.

Justin Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of The Myth of the Rational Market. Follow him on Twitter @foxjust.

To subscribe or visit go to:  http://www.riskcenter.com

http://riskcenter.com/articles/story/view_story?story=99915473