Unwarranted by Barry Friedman

Author:Barry Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

11

GOVERNMENT DATABASES

We are living in the age of Big Data—a time of big possibilities but also big problems. With data abundant, the natural urge of government has been to gather and make something of all that information. What could be better than to eliminate crime, terrorism even, with nothing but information? Focus on that hope often has blinded us to the real difficulties and threats posed by this mass data grab.

In assessing the value of data to policing, it is important to pay attention to the countless instances in which the use of databases erroneously causes law enforcement to target a wholly innocent individual; mistakes here can be costly both to the government and the person involved.

Ironically, though, the mass collection of personal data by the government should concern us just as much when the process is error-free and the data used as intended. That is because the whole point of the mass collection of data so common today is to allow the government to build dossiers on as many of us as possible, on the theory that once the accumulated data is analyzed, offenders will pop out. For the system to work, the government must have access to the data of everyone, innocent as well as guilty, in order to search for patterns that point to wrongdoers. What that means in practice is that the government is building vast databases of our personal information. We all are forced to relinquish our privacy and security, and that should be of serious concern.

The endeavor to collect massive amounts of data in an effort to keep us all safe may be a good idea or a bad one, depending on how such data-collection programs are adopted and implemented. The trick is to use the principles of democratic and constitutional policing to maximize the possibilities of databases, while minimizing the threats to our liberties and privacy. That’s essential, but it is not at all what the government is doing at present.

THE DANGERS OF DATABASES

Meet Abe Mashal—an average Midwestern guy. He’s tall, taciturn, a big fellow with a baby face and a goatee. A dog trainer by profession, on April 20, 2010, Mashal was in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, en route to Spokane to train a customer’s pets. The trip, though, had gotten off to a bad start. When Mashal tried to check in online the night before, he was told he had to do it with an agent at the airport. So he got to O’Hare early—faced with squeezing his large frame into an airplane seat, he was eager to make Southwest Airlines’s first boarding group. The ticket counter agent typed his name into the computer, gave him a “very strange look,” and then disappeared into the back. Minutes later, Mashal was surrounded by some thirty officers from the Chicago Police and Transportation Safety Administration.1

That’s when the counter agent told him he was on the No Fly List.2

Mashal thought this had to be a joke, “some huge mix-up.” Told the FBI wanted to interview him, he agreed, provisionally.

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