The Westeros Wing

When Edward Snowden leaked classified documents that revealed the existence of PRISM, a wide-reaching NSA surveillance program, internet activists exploded in outrage. Angry netizens accused the NSA of violating the Constitution’s fourth amendment and the basic American right to privacy. However, after years of silence during targeted NSA surveillance, it was clear whose privacy activists were concerned about: their own. The outrage of “internet activists,” over PRISM reveals underlying racism and selfishness in a community that prides itself on openness and freedom.

The PRISM program, in place since 2007, allows the NSA  to access and store online metadata from companies such as google and yahoo. PRISM uses algorithms to reveal suspicious communication patterns that could point to security threats. After NSA contractor Snowden became alarmed at the reach of the program, he leaked details of the program media. Social networking sites such as Reddit and internet activist groups like the EFF immediately announced their firm opposition to the program, alongside their shock and horror that the NSA would dare peek at the information they had given to private companies.

The loud opposition to PRISM is grounded in the fact that it uses metadata which requires that it have access to the online lives of all Americans. This all encompassing mandate contrasts with earlier NSA projects, which monitored the internet usage of specific targets who were deemed a threat. If activists were concerned with privacy in general, then spying into the communications of targeted individuals should concern them as well. But internet activists are concerned with themselves and their own. While they distrust the NSA with their work emails and skype dates, they simultaneously trust them to accurately discern which individuals are suspicious enough to warrant a violation of their own rights (often without a warrant).

Using mass surveillance instead of targeting surveillance has been compared throwing everyone in jail, rather than just law-breakers. But this comparison is ignorant to the racism and Islamophobia in America and American institutions, particularly regarding security threats. In 2010, a judge ruled that the NSA’s phone and email surveillance of Al Haramain, an Islamic charity group in Oregon, was illegal and unwarranted. The violation occurred in 2004, three years before the birth of PRISM. Rather than outrage, the reaction of the internet and it’s defenders of privacy, was silence. Privacy from government surveillance has always been the privilege of the privileged. Minorities, whether racial, religious, or political, have always had to guard against government infiltration or monitoring.

It’s unlikely that any but the most extreme internet activists want to abandon all NSA surveillance. More likely, they want to return to the days when the NSA read the emails of Muslim chairities. Discrimination and targeted surveillance is a vast improvement on mass surveillance when you aren’t part of the group that’s discriminated against.