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Rozsa, George GregoryEnglish 3182September 15, 2015

Leviathan

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns … And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.1

Leviathan just might be an apt metaphor for the Department of Homeland Security2;

although, in Thomas Hobbes’ example, Leviathan is an external threat for whom we (as men in a

natural—read violent—state of nature) must surrender certain liberties and freedoms to a

sovereign that can protect us from Leviathan and ensure our safety. Such presumptions of said

protection became tenuous, however, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 [attacks]. In

response to these attacks, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the

USA Patriot Act, thus authorizing an extensive surveillance apparatus designed to thwart

terrorism directed at the United States and its interests abroad.

PRISM, a NSA covert operation designed to extract electronic information directly from

U.S. internet-based company servers, “was launched from the ashes of President George W.

Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007” (Washington Post), to shore

up perceived deficiencies in the FISA warrant process, which limited the agency’s tracking of

potential terrorist suspects (Guardian). According to The Guardian, PRISM circumvents FISA

law by enabling the NSA to obtain private communications directly from participating

companies, “without having to request them from the service providers and without having to

obtain individual court orders” (Guardian). Notwithstanding official company denials, classified

NSA documents leaked to The Washington Post by Eric Snowden list Microsoft, Google, Yahoo,

Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple as Current Providers from whom the

agency collects and stores such confidential communications as e-mail, chats, videos, photos,

VoIP, stored data, logins, network connections, etc. (Washington Post).

1 Revelation 13:1,7 http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-Chapter-13/2 The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) possesses seven heads of its own: Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement, U.S. Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and U.S. Coast Guard.

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James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, claims that “information collected

under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information

we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats” (Washington Post).

Clapper’s appeal to national security underscore’s the Faustian bargain at the heart Hobbe’s

Leviathan—the trade-off between individual freedom (represented here in the form of privacy)

and perceived security (in the NSA’s ability to monitor and thwart future terrorist attacks from

the data obtained through the surrender of such privacy). Marcus Yallow’s father in Cory

Doctorow’s Little Brother represents the type of individual who is willing to sacrifice privacy for

security. "They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure getting a lot of scumbags

off the streets,” Marcus’ father intimates, “If you don’t have anything to hide—” (45).

And that appears to be a common refrain of those individuals willing to trade privacy for

security, if you do not have anything to hide then you have nothing to fear. But as Doctorow

shows us, Marcus was detained by the San Francisco Police Department because of his

anomalous movements. “We’ve been watching you since you left the BART,” one officer tells

Marcus, “Your Fast Pass says that you’ve been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot of funny

hours” (Doctorow 40). Involuntary as well as voluntary surveillance runs the risk of degenerating

into a police state where individuals are detained simply because the state cannot comprehend

what it deems as irrational behavior. Notwithstanding these detentions nor any detention,

surveillance has the tendency to alter one’s actions simply by being internalized. This is also

known as self-policing. And this works on the individual whether one has something to hide or

not.

Then there is the whole issue of the false positive paradox. Even if the NSA’s surveillance

program was 99% effective, “In a city of twenty million like New York,” Marcus says, “a 99

percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists” (Doctorow

47). The problem, Marcus notes, is that “only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys,

you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people” (Ibid). Under this

logic, the semblance of security necessarily results in insecurity for a large swatch of the

population, the bulk of whom already resides on the margins of society, which brings me to the

question of why.

When I first heard of the NSA’s data collection program, I was skeptical—not that I did

not believe they were collecting as much data as they were, but I have been following a number

of Big Data conferences around the country and I just do not believe we have the capability of

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processing that much data. So why collect it? And more importantly, why leak it? Perhaps

Doctorow gives us a reason. Marcus’ father’s explanation of Bayesian analysis leads Marcus to

the conclusion that while the DHS cannot “tell who’s passing Xnet packets by looking at the

contents of those packets … [they] can … find out who is sending way, way more encrypted

traffic than everyone else” (Doctorow 41). And then I think of that long stretch of highway

between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I think of those “Highway monitored by radar” signs. This

stretch of lonely highway has not been monitored by radar since the 1970s. And no one takes

them seriously, but back in the day, we did. We internalized the warning and slowed down even

as we knew we were all alone on that desert road. Leaking the NSA’s data mining and collection

programs will inevitably steer those individuals seeking to circumvent the program down

anomalous corridors and alleyways where their irregularities can be identified. Subsequently

going back to the haystack with a target in hand is much more effective than the nearly

impossible task of trying to locate the target from within haystack itself—and I, I took the one

less traveled by and that has made all the difference.

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Works Cited

Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. New York: Tor, 2008. Print.

Gellman, Barton and Laura Poitras. “U.S. British Intelligence Mining Data from U.S. Internet

Companies in Broad Secret Program.” The Washington Post 7 June 2013. mining-data-

from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-

11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html.

Greenwald, Glenn and Ewen MacAskill. “NSA Prism Program Taps in to User Data of

Apple, Google and Others.” The Guardian 7 June 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/

world/2013/jun/06/us- tech-giants-nsa-data.