Why Privacy Matters by Neil Richards

Author:Neil Richards [Richards, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-11-04T23:00:00+00:00

The FBI’s letter is so outrageous that it’s worth pausing on it for a moment to appreciate what happened. The U.S. government’s primary law enforcement agency subjected the most significant American political dissident in the modern era to surveillance because they thought he might be a Soviet agent trying to destabilize America’s racially segregated social order. The official government investigation into the Dr. King wiretaps concluded in 1976, “The FBI . . . acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King’s hotel and motel rooms in an ‘attempt’ to obtain information about the ‘private activities of King and his advisers’ for use to ‘completely discredit’ them.”52

The FBI’s surveillance revealed that King was no communist agent. He was certainly trying to destabilize America’s racially segregated social order, but his motivations were his deeply held political and religious convictions about the basic equality of human beings, and because (as he put it so memorably) he had a dream for a better future for the country of his birth. Yet while the FBI’s surveillance revealed that King wasn’t a communist, it did reveal that he was having an extramarital affair, something which (to borrow the language of the NSA’s porn surveillance program) was a “vulnerability.” The FBI’s letter, accompanied by surveillance photos of King with his mistress, was an attempt to “neutralize” him as a threat to what the FBI saw as America’s national interest: Kill yourself, or we will unleash our “truth bomb” on your family and on your political movement.

The FBI has certainly reformed its practices since its attempt to “neutralize” King. Some of these reforms have been a result of professionalization within the agency,53 while others have resulted from federal privacy law, which has prohibited warrantless wiretapping since 1968.54 But risks—and abuses—are inevitable, even by otherwise well-meaning agents who zealously pursue their targets and are “just doing their jobs.” This is a particular worry at a time in American politics when nonpartisan law enforcement agencies have in the recent past been placed under significant pressure to show loyalty above all else to the president, a phenomenon documented in great detail by Andrew McCabe, a career FBI agent who served as acting FBI director during and witness to such pressure during the Trump administration.55

Beyond the ethical pressures on law enforcement, the risks of surveillance abuses are even greater in our digital world, in which more sensitive information is created and stored in digital formats and our security services have access to far more sophisticated tools than the ones used by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to investigate King. Imagine a dissident like Dr. King living in today’s information age. A government (or political opponent) that wanted him silenced might be able to obtain access not just to his telephone conversations but also to his reading habits and emails. This critic could be blackmailed outright; he could be discredited by disclosure of the information as an example to others; or he could be shamed or “canceled” on social media. Perhaps he has not been having an affair but has some other secret.

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