Where to Draw the Line on Government Surveillance

Where to draw the line on government surveillance 

You're being watched. But, of course, you already knew that.

Camera surveillance has become an accepted -- almost expected -- backdrop to modern life. We willingly give permission to Google and Facebook to make billions trading on our personal preferences and interests. And it's been common knowledge for decades that Canada participates with the United States and other English-speaking countries in monitoring global communications. Given all this, how can anyone be properly shocked by news the U.S. government is collating massive amounts of information gleaned from online sources or cellphone logs?

Nevertheless, despite the banality of our modern lack of privacy, it's important to consider what is and is not acceptable in the world of Big Data. There are still a few bastions of confidentiality worth fighting for.

Last week, the Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers published evidence from Edward Snowden, a former U.S. National Security Administration (NSA) contractor, explaining the existence of a hitherto-unknown electronic surveillance project called Prism, which allows government agents access to the servers of some of the world's largest online firms, including Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Skype and Microsoft. (See "The new Nixon" on page 28.) Additional revelations uncovered the scrutiny of U.S. cellular phone records by the NSA, as well.

The apparent purpose of Prism and other surveillance projects is to profile and track terror suspects worldwide. And while the process sound ominous, it's no more ominous than earlier efforts.

For decades the Americans, along with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have been intercepting global satellite communications through a system popularly known as Echelon, or the Five Eyes. Echelon has been the subject of several books and lengthy media reports, as well as an investigation by the European Union in 2001 into whether the information was being used...