This is a link to pretty much the best story on the NSA panopticon. The key thing is that since the NSA records all the internet thanks to links to the undersea cables, the metadata from the companies helps bring the other stuff together. NSA gets your metadata from Google, and then it can go into your inbox that’s stored into their Internet2. This is clearly a panopticon. The NSA can access anything and everything, ever.

Ok, so what should we think about this?

There’s actually a good argument that…this is actually not a bad approach. 

Let’s say you run a country and want to protect its citizens from terrorism. Let’s say you can build a panopticon. And let’s say you sincerely believe in civil liberties. 

You’re highly aware of the fact that there is a technological arms race between terrorists and anti-terrorists, and that terrorists have a built-in advantage due to asymmetricality. Technology has evolved such that government can build a panopticon, but technology has also evolved such that a dozen guys can release VX into the New York subway’s AC, sneak a suitcase nuke in Chicago, engineer a weaponized version of SARS, etc. 

You’re also highly aware of the fact that the worst thing that could happen to civil liberties would be another dramatic terrorist attack on US soil which would make the political momentum for a police state truly unstoppable.

What do you do?

It seems to me, you build the panopticon. Seems you just have to. It’s panopticon vs suitcase nukes. Civil libertarians reading this will blow a gasket, but really, is that not the choice?

It seems to me you build the panopticon and then you make it hard to access it. You build oversight. You make rules. You have a court oversee it. Has to be a secret court, but there has to be a court.

It’s like assassinations. Sorry, but you can’t fight an effective fight against terrorism without assassinations. You have to assassinate people. The thing you do, however (that Israel does, with great success, but that the US doesn’t, inexplicably), is have a court validate your kill list. 

The US also needs to have nukes. We also need to have safeguards around them—legal, hierarchical, technical, cultural. 

That, it seems to me, sounds like roughly the right approach, and it also sounds like roughly the spirit of the Obama Administration approach.

If we agree that we need what you might call a limited-acces panopticon, then the problems around the various revelations we have aren’t so much the existence of the panopticon itself, but:

• The level of oversight. Is the 7-day window as scary as it sounds? Is the FISA Court a rubber-stamp? (Perhaps it never turns down anything because it’s a rubber-stamp; perhaps it never turns down anything because the NSA/FBI has been trained not to ask for warrants it won’t get. My impression is in regular law enforcement judges almost never refuse warrant requests but that’s because cops know not to ask for warrants they know they won’t get.)
• The extent of the security state. 5 gajillion people have top secret requests, which is ridiculous.
• The privatization of the security state. (Very linked, but not the same as the previous.) Ridiculous that a 3-month Booz Allen contractor had the Powerpoint on Prism. And the privatization of the security state leads to an intelligence-industrial complex which creates a constituency for its own continuation. THAT is truly scary, because THAT is the avenue for panopticon abuse. But if that’s the problem that’s not the same problem as the panopticon.

Am I missing something?