With the surveillance of the world by the NSA being played up and down the media, it is easy to forget why it is a problem to begin with. It’s easy to argue that the NSA actually should do what it’s doing, after all they are fighting terrorists and criminals, and these arguments are dangerously alluring.

Surveillance
Surveillance by jonathan mcintosh, on Flickr

We want to feel safe, surveillance by the state needs its limits. It needs them not just for those that have nothing to hide, but also to those that do. While we general want to have our populace to obey the agreed upon laws and conventions, social evolution happens because people challenged the established borders and laws in our society.

This is not some abstract thought experiment, this is something that we were able to observe within living memory. Imagine for a minute the world of 1955. Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks - Image Source: Wikipedia If Rosa Parks had been constantly surveilled, the civil rights movement might not have ever gotten of the ground. What if the NSA, that had just been founded 3 years before, had ignored it’s mandate limit and listened in on every meeting of Martin Luther King.

While the breaking of laws in general is something societies frown upon, it’s the breaking and bending of established norms that is the universal cause of progress. If our surveillance becomes so tight as to basically eliminate all law breaking, we eliminate progress.

If that were all, then we could put it off for the future. After all even with the NSA programs that have become public and the ones that likely exists and have not become known yet we are quite a bit of from total surveillance yet. The problem though is that even before the system has become perfect, it throws its shadows.

It’s about self-censorship. If you have to fear that the government is listening to you and have to fear consequences from what you say, you will automatically restrict what you say. Whether the state actually assigns consequences or not is actually immaterial. The potential for consequences due to the existence of government surveillance is a sufficient motivator for self-censorship.

A prime example for this in another context can be found in the book publishing industry of modern day China. A recent New York Times article on the subject contains the following quote by the editor in chief of a prominent publishing house in Beijing:

“Self-censorship has become the most effective weapon”
New York Times: Authors Accept Censors’ Rules to Sell in China

Stopping social progress is a problem for any imperfect society. We can all agree that the United States, while better than many/most, has not yet attained perfection. Until it has government surveillance is a problem.

I speak of the United States because it’s a country whose issues touch the entire world and anyone on the planet will be aware of the media coverage of the US surveillance programs as well as the countries history. The same principal applies to any society.

To believe that there is a country on the planet that is capable of observing its citizens that is currently refraining is akin to believing in the easter bunny. Of course GCHQ (Great Britain), the BND (Germany) and many others are doing the same thing. This is a globalised world and this is a global issue.

So it’s not just that the NSA is a danger to the USA, government surveillance is a danger to the western world.