[Tablet] You may think you're not worth spying on. But to our government, we're all terrorists now.
My email was being “held in government quarantine” pending review, a letter from Yahoo! informed me. I was sitting in the computer lab in the German department at New York University. It was September of 2003. I remember because I’d just received an email about a merit scholarship for that semester. The government wants to know about my scholarship? was my first thought. My next one was: Let ‘em. What did I care if the government knew my GPA?
This is a common line of reasoning in the bulk surveillance era. The “nothing to hide” argument, which, as Edward Snowden points out, was likely the brainchild of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Americans really took to it back in 2013, when Snowden revealed the government’s mass spying programs. Unless their private photos were being looked at, nobody cared. |