About a year before Edward Snowden informed America that the NSA was essentially spying on everyone, WIRED Magazine published an article that seemed to describe some sort of post-apocalyptic totalitarian government. In the article, “The NSA Is Building The Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say),” James Bamford details the outskirts of a small Mormon town that would soon be home to a data storage center “more than five times the size of the US Capitol.” Opened in 2013, the center cost $2 billion and is able to hold yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of information, which is 500 quintillion pages of text, or 1,000 times the annual amount of global internet traffic data. When I read this article, I thought it had come straight out of a science fiction movie – there was no way the government would build a massive data storage unit to monitor the entire world wide web. I threw the magazine onto one of my shelves to collect dust, and a year later, it came back to bite me. Edward Snowden was on every headline of every news channel, announcing that the sci-fi movie had become real life in America. The government is watching me – and they’re watching you too. They have been since the Nixon era, and if they win this new lawsuit against Apple, they could be tracking every single smartphone user at all times, in all places.
I know what you’re thinking. I sound like a paranoid anarchist who’s prepared to expatriate at a moment’s notice. Well, I’m not – I’m proud to be an American citizen and I have nothing to hide, but that doesn’t mean the government should be able to look at the contents of my phone at will. The lawsuit is between the federal government, which has possession of the phone of the San Bernardino shooters, and Apple, who has been asked to create software to allow the government to solve the passcode and break into the phone. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, will fight this battle with everything he has because he believes that creating this software would break the trust of millions of customers, as well as their right to privacy. I agree with him. I am aware that the government has a warrant for the phone, which they found after the fatal attack. However, if and when this software exists, it will be a slippery slope towards getting a warrant to search someone’s phone after an attack, and perhaps before a suspected attack, and eventually if they seem “suspicious.” If I Google the word “bomb” will I be suspicious? Does writing this article make me suspicious? Those could be real questions in a few years if the government abuses the power that this software would give them.
On the other hand, I know that if my loved one had been killed in the attack, I would certainly want this phone unlocked to find all possible evidence about the killers. It would be impossible to think objectively in that circumstance. This brings us to the question that Americans must consider at a time like this – which do we value more, security or privacy? I’m an innocent American who wishes no harm on anyone, so if the government is spying on me, I have nothing to hide. However, that isn’t the attitude that I should have – if I’m living in the land of the free, I should have the freedom to have a certain degree of privacy. Honestly, I’m scared for the world that my kids will live in - I’m afraid that both terror threats and security measures will increase, which is a loss in both directions. I don’t know what the answer is, but either way, I don’t like where this is going.
