Maybe it’s cause for hope that notable politicians and tech experts are starting to speak out about our government’s surveillance policies. Bruce Schneier is one. A top computer security expert with a knack for communicating, he writes books, he blogs online and recently he has been publicly … shall we say … skeptical of what the Internet has become and what we’re learning about our government.
Recently, he wrote this in a discussion of how government and corporate pronouncements have completely lost our trust:
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has claimed that the NSA’s massive surveillance and data mining programs have helped stop more than 50 terrorist plots, 10 inside the U.S. Do you believe him? I think it depends on your definition of “helped.”
The whole thing is worth reading. But this one sentence pushed a hot button that I was trying to describe to the fair and industrious and infinitely patient Trudy.
Whether we believe the good director general or not does not only depend on the definition of helped. It depends on
- what surveillance means
- what qualifies as a data mining program
- what stop means
- what terrorist means
- what a plot is
- what it means to be inside the US
In short, not a single word can be taken at face value. Nothing is what it seems.
People joked for years about Clinton’s it depends on what the meaning of is is, but this kind of triangulation is now the norm.
Schneier is right. Something needs to be done to restore our trust.