INTERVIEW WITH BENJAMIN WITTES
Does electronic surveillance threaten democracy? | No
Does electronic surveillance threaten democracy?
No, electronic surveillance is essential for democracy. Taking away the authority to conduct surveillance on electronic platforms would not allow free thought to flourish but rather would enable violent anti-democratic activists to organize unmolested. Ask yourself, should the only control on violent white supremacists on Facebook be…Facebook?
We just had four years of an anti-democratic president who abused all kinds of power. But one of the reasons Donald Trump went to war against the FBI was because he couldn’t abuse it enough. He couldn’t shut down investigations he wanted shut down, or loose the FBI on Hillary Clinton, James Comey or Hunter Biden. So that suggests that the surveillance regime is relatively under control. Misused, of course, it can threaten democracy, like any other tool that democratic governments use to protect ordered liberty and authoritarian governments use to control people.
There is no effective counterterrorism without collection of data. There is no effective countering of white supremacy, because these groups organize online. There’s no cybersecurity. And that’s just preventing bad things. There also needs to be legitimate espionage. We’ve all spent four years complaining about Russian intervention in the 2016 election and wanting that investigated. That requires a whole lot of forensic analysis of Russian platforms. Some of those indictments can tell you what desk in St. Petersburg sent what tweet pretending to be the Tennessee Republican Party. They didn’t get that information by asking for it. That’s a democracy defending itself using surveillance.
How do you balance surveillance with security?
One bad sign is when you see the intelligence community collecting information domestically the way it does abroad. When the intelligence services operate abroad, they have a pretty free hand. In the U.S., it’s much more confined. The Justice Department can’t just investigate you because they’re interested; they need a reason, a predicate. If they follow the rules, it doesn’t threaten democracy. If, on the other hand, people are peacefully protesting in Portland, Oregon, and local police or Department of Homeland Security intelligence collect their electronic communications and report on them and keep files based on their purely First Amendment protected activity, that’s a problem. It actually happened to me. I was commenting on the protests from Washington and they issued intelligence reports about me and my Twitter feed and leaked them to The Washington Post. So I have zero confidence they were following the rules in Portland.
Abuses do happen, but on the whole the system works pretty well. And in gun violence and police shootings, we’re more likely to have too little information than too much. Say someone shoots up a school and we didn’t see his social media sites where he was saying, “Off to shoot up a school now!” We weren’t looking, or we weren’t authorized to look. Authoritarian systems don’t have this problem.
Ask yourself, should the only control on violent white supremacists on Facebook be…Facebook?
Are private companies part of the problem?
Data brokers collect information about you whether you want them to or not. I think what they do is offensive to privacy, but I’m not sure whether it’s a threat to democracy. Facebook is much more complicated, because social media adds some good things to the world. It allows people to organize politically, including in some authoritarian countries, and it combats isolation. That said, if you look at what the Russians were able to do using social media micro-targeting of communities in 2016 and the role Facebook has played in the rise of deranged conspiracy theories, this is a very scary thing democratically. I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think the fundamental problem is the surveillance. Nobody is guiding it editorially from outside.
Does improving technology make the problem worse?
You used to have to physically attach an alligator clip to someone’s phone line to surveil them electronically, and then listen to the tapes. Now you can collect on a huge number of people at the same time, if you have the authority, and process the information just by pressing a key. But I don’t think it fundamentally changes the principle that, if you want activity on a platform to be non-democratically-threatening, you have to police that platform. You want a police presence on the National Mall when the Proud Boys rally, and I feel exactly the same way about electronic platforms.
Are Jews especially threatened by surveillance?
Vulnerable communities have a greater interest in proper surveillance of people who threaten them. Israel is generally cheerful about surveillance. The Jewish community has a more than average interest in reasonable surveillance of neo-Nazis. And communities that have faced oppression have an acute interest in the restraints on government that prevent that kind of thing. As Jews, we’re invested in both sides of the equation—and in getting the balance right.
One thought on “Moment Debate | Does Electronic Surveillance Threaten Democracy?”
Is electronic surveillance equipment an invasion of privacy?