They see you when you’re sleeping. They know when you’re awake. And boy, do they know if you’ve been bad or good.
For our friends at the National Security Agency, it’s just all in a day’s work.
Whether it’s looking at our phone calls, indexing our emails, checking our Facebook accounts or even going into our videogames, the NSA has been hard at work cataloging as much information on Americans as possible, all in the name of national security.
Though critics and activists have responded with a flood of angry rhetoric, little has been done to stem the tide of surveillance. But that’s beginning to change.
California State Senators Ted Lieu (D-Los Angeles) and Joel Anderson (R-San Diego) introduced a bill earlier this month that would prevent any state resources from assisting a federal agency in obtaining information without a specific warrant. The way the bill is written would ban California employees and agencies from aiding the NSA surveillance programs that have recently come to light.
In actuality, the bill would likely have little to no effect on the federal agency, but the symbolism behind the legislation resembles another kind of citizen activism known all too well at the UC: a good, old fashioned protest.
When students protest discrimination or budget cuts, no one’s expecting to defeat racism or fix higher education funding in one day. It’s symbolic: we’re here, we know our rights and we want this discussion to happen.
This bill works the same way. As one of many bills passing through multiple state legislatures, from bright red Arizona to deep blue Washington, there’s a significant message being sent to the Feds.
As the generation with the most to lose in the debate over privacy and spying, college students should welcome Lieu and Anderson’s efforts, which are ripped straight from the student playbook.
So how do we start this discussion? The first step would be to look at the outdated legal precedents challenged in the California bill. Specifically, in order for the spying to be illegal, existing law requires plaintiffs to prove that they had a “reasonable expectation” of privacy while doing what they were doing.
For example: the NSA can’t transcribe my phone calls without a warrant. But they can look up whom I called, from where, and for how long. Since this is data my phone company stores anyway, it’s not reasonable for me to expect that information to be private.
The same goes for Internet data.Every Google search I input comes back to me, often in the form of a targeted advertisement. Even email accounts on remote servers could fall under this umbrella of unreasonable privacy expectations. Since someone else is already logging where the emails are sent, I can’t say that data is private.
It’s important to note that passing a bill in any number of state legislatures can only start a conversation and won’t reverse a legal precedent. The tangible footprint of the proposed California bill would be felt in Irvine and Davis, where both UC schools have joint research operations with the NSA. But neither program’s mission statement says that it is involved with spying or metadata collection, and therefore the programs would probably be unaffected.
However, even something as simple as media attention can force the federal government’s hand. A protest of this magnitude stretching across multiple state governments can set up change down the line.
The outrage hasn’t fallen on totally deaf ears. On Friday, President Barack Obama proposed some reforms to the NSA metadata collection program, including requiring court orders for every phone number it wants to query.
These proposals don’t go far enough, though. Generation Y spends more time online than on the phone, and the president’s reforms provided little in that regard.
That is why it’s important for students to be active in the effort spearheaded by Lieu and Anderson. If these bills jumpstart a national conversation, it shouldn’t be without involving the people most susceptible to future abuses.
Despite the legislation’s deficits, it’s an important step toward securing a more private future.
Email Nelson at rnelson@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.