Debate Primer: Domestic Surveillance

This week, Political Union will debate whether domestic surveillance is in the best interest of the American people. Going back to 2008, when then-President George W. Bush signed the FISA Amendment into law, various American intelligence agencies have been able to petition for court approval to covertly monitor Americans. Significant elements of the NSA’s misuse of the FISA monitoring system, especially through the so-called PRISM program, were made public by Edward Snowden in 2013. Since then, domestic surveillance has been at the forefront of the American political conversation, as citizens grapple with the digital age reality that the US government has near-instantaneous access to individuals’ online accounts and private personal information. 

For this explainer, I’ve done my best to assemble a list of resources that is as comprehensive as possible topically, while maintaining ideological balance and not relying on overly technical writing and explanations and avoiding lengthy formats. You’ll see that it wasn’t always possible to satisfy all these criteria.

I would recommend this resource from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an overview of what exactly the NSA is capable of (as far as we know publicly), with the caveat that the EFF opposes surveillance. The page that’s linked here is the “how it works” landing screen, but I highly recommend the FAQs, and even the embedded hour long documentary, if it turns out that this is your passion [5 mins].

Here’s an essay arguing for the dismantling of the US government’s domestic surveillance apparatus, on the grounds that it is ineffective and overly invasive [8 mins].

Here are some statistics from Pew on public approval of government surveillance, with specific emphasis on facial recognition technology used by police. The figures (from 2019) indicate that Americans mostly trust law enforcement to use facial recognition, but have less trust for advertisers and tech companies [10 mins].

This is an op-ed from 2019 by a New York City law enforcement officer, arguing that facial recognition technology has improved the city’s safety, and led to nearly 1,000 arrests in 2018 alone [7 mins].

Here’s an op-ed from the same series in the Times arguing that Congress has failed to legislate aggressively enough as surveillance technology evolves [11 mins].

If academic publications are your thing, here’s an argument for surveillance as a tool for maintaining public order from 2018. The author distinguishes between surveillance in public and private spheres, and argues that government surveillance levels the playing field between criminals of various socioeconomic strata [24 pages].

In fact, the history of American domestic surveillance goes back much further, to the beginning of the previous century. Here’s a lengthy historical essay (from 2013, during the Snowden news cycle) about American surveillance policy and previous public reactions to government overreach [30 mins].

"CCTV camera" by Mike_fleming is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.