NSA revelations show how technology is redefining privacy

I'm tempted to joke about the number of times I've ordered takeout, but there's nothing funny about revelations that the federal government has for years been tracking our phone calls.

Folks are right to be outraged by a secret court order, revealed by the Guardian, requiring Verizon to turn over phone records to the National Security Agency, tracking calls coming in and out, and the length of time on the call.

We can only assume the NSA has standing orders for other telephone providers. It's perfectly legal, under rights granted to the feds by the Patriot Act, and it's not the first time the government's spied on its own. For decades, the FBI's COINTELPRO operatives investigated and interfered with civil rights and other political groups, for example. I suspect that what people are finding so outrageous this week is not the spying, but the spying on everyone.

For that, we have to thank not just the Patriot Act, but technology. I'm sure J. Edgar Hoover would have tapped every American phone line if he could have managed it, but he'd never have lived long enough to sift through the data.

Today, it's no big project to run numbers from zillions of phone calls in order to detect suspicious patterns. Security experts have said that's likely how the Verizon data is being used. You don't need a wiretap. Don't even need a person to listen to the calls.

The Guardian story lends new weight to another recent controversy about privacy - the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision that police can collect DNA samples from suspects, even before they've been convicted of a crime.

DNA evidence is our most exact identifier - it can be a critical piece of evidence in convictions and exonerations. We also leave it everywhere, on cups and doorknobs, in dirty handkerchiefs and nearly everything we touch.

But it's ours, critics argue. There's something Big Brother and sinister about collecting it against our will.

TECHNOLOGY AND PRIVACY

I read the pros and cons online, next to a list of targeted advertisements - chosen especially for me based on my recent Web history.

We're used to that part - to searching online for a dentist and suffering through weeks of ads for toothpaste and whitening creams on every website we browse.

The fact is, quietly and with little public discussion, technology is radically redefining privacy.

We talked a bit about this recently on the recent show, “Ethical Perspectives on the News,” aired on KCRG-TV9, where I was on with Cornell College Computer Science Department's Leon Tabak and Johnson County Sheriff's Office Detective Sgt. James Roberts. The topic was identity theft, but our conversation quickly drifted to just how much of our information is out there, and how easily it is added up.

Tabak talked about how it's possible to identify unique individuals using little more than a ZIP code and date of birth. In one study, researchers, using 1990 census data, were able to uniquely identify 87 percent of the U.S. population using only ZIP code, birth date and gender.

Marketers collect information about us all of the time, luring us into divulging bits and pieces about ourselves through online surveys or in the store with savings cards and text-messaged deals.

The Nielsen Co. has a product called PRIZM, which uses all that information to categorize every U.S. household as one of 66 distinct types. That's not to be confused with the alleged top-secret anti-terrorism program, PRISM, which, according to last week's Washington Post, has been mining user data from giant Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. And no, I am not making any of this up.

THEY DEFINE US

PRIZM defines us not only by demographics such as age, family status and education, but by our hobbies and likes, our investments and assets, by the magazines we read, TV shows we watch and even the cars we drive.

In my Iowa City neighborhood (made up primarily of Boomtown Singles, City Startups, Middleburg Managers, New Beginnings and Suburban Pioneers, according to Nielsen), for example, we shop at Pottery Barn and fill prescriptions at Target. We drive Kias, Mitsubishis and Hyundais and watch “Washington Week” or FX.

A separate Nielsen product focuses solely on our comfort with technology, sorting us into groups such as Analoggers and Technovators, The Unconnected, or Techs and the City. All that data is yours, for a price.

It's shocking that marketers and investigators are mining the mundane details of our daily lives. That they're able to put them together in eerily accurate ways. But it shouldn't be. We've been living in this Brave New World for decades.

It's time to bring expectations of, and regulations protecting our privacy up to date.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net