Surveillance of those suspected of wrongdoing, or who threaten some legitimate government, or of military targets is an ancient practice. From biblical times, for instance, one sees spies checking out the "promised land," bodyguards seeing that the king is protected, and watchers keeping guard over a city against illicit or violent activity. It even seems to echo the all-seeing eye of God, although as soon as God is invoked as surveillant, biblical attention is directed to the primary motif of God's care for creation and especially for the vulnerable—God notices the sparrow, and how much more the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger.

In modern times, surveillance has become centrally significant as a feature of organizational life, both within government and policing on the one hand, and in the corporate sector, including workplaces, on the other. Back in the 1960s, Jacques Ellul showed presciently that surveillance subtly seeps beyond bounds, monitoring more and more of us. And as surveillance seems to spill over into inappropriate areas of life, checks have also been placed on it, in our day, by regulatory mechanisms, technical devices, and data protection and privacy laws. Such limits are important for open democracy, for everyday liberties, and for living without fear of unknown eyes.

The revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden laid bare some striking features of surveillance today that had not been so clear to many. The NSA is engaged in widespread surveillance, and for many this ramping-up is seen as a necessary response to the attacks of 9/11. But the ways that data are obtained—whether willingly or not—from telephone and internet companies struck a discordant note. Could we as customers trust those companies to keep our data and, crucially, metadata secure? The NSA disclosures show that the very marketplace of modern life is public in ways we never guessed. The internet, where we conduct our business, meet our friends, converse with colleagues, organize politically, and share our hopes and fears, is now also an uneasy environment in which surveillance is rampant.

The mention of "metadata" prompts comment. Of course, the NSA and other such agencies have the means to listen in on conversations and tap into messages. But the main activity is trawling through massive amounts of digital data in order to pull together disparate details of the time and place of calls and messages, their duration, and with whom they were conducted. Such metadata can also reveal medical, religious, and other sensitive information, so they are far from innocent or innocuous. There is no doubt that this is dragnet-style mass surveillance that includes domestic populations as well as foreign nationals. The NSA Report, discussed below, says the status of metadata should be studied further but doubts that the distinction between data and metadata makes much sense.

The Snowden revelations continue to make headlines through a kind of drip-feed insistence. Although some evidence is patchy, many aspects of NSA-style surveillance are very clearly demonstrated. The agencies' responses range from scathing dismissal of Snowden to grudging admission that at least some of what he says is correct. To his credit, President Obama commissioned a study by some leading experts: The NSA Report: Liberty and Security in a Changing World. Meanwhile Snowden himself has made a number of electronically enabled public appearances during 2014, and the key journalist with whom he shared the evidence, Glenn Greenwald, came out with his own account: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Both books are clear that the U.S. government should end practices such as bulk phone-data collection, that the internet is a key arena of struggle, that privacy and civil liberties are vital values, and that far greater transparency and accountability is required of surveillance programs. It's worth noting these areas of common ground because they are extensive and important, not to say somewhat surprising. Indeed, the report to the president concludes that "some of the authorities that were expanded or created in the aftermath to September 11 unduly sacrifice fundamental interests in individual liberty, personal privacy, and democratic governance," a judgment which resonates with Glenn Greenwald's more forceful version. Speaking of the exaggerated threat of terrorism, he argues that "[t]he idea that we should dismantle the core protections of our political system to erect a ubiquitous surveillance state for the sake of this risk is the height of irrationality."

Of course, the two books also have very different starting points. The genesis of Greenwald's broadside is that he, along with filmmaker Laura Poitras, was nominated by Snowden to receive and to disseminate as they saw fit the files he had lifted from his employer. No Place to Hide documents what transpired from the weeks of ignoring the messages from an unknown Snowden to the moments of sheer disbelief as Greenwald read the astonishing documents. A program called PRISM allows the NSA to pull in private communications from internet giants including Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, and Skype. An instruction manual for NSA spooks shows how to use phone and email logs to discover details about and listen in to their targets. Ordinary Americans were under state surveillance in ways of which no one outside the NSA had dreamed. The stunningly big story implicated not only the secretive NSA but also the "five eyes" of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA, along with many other countries, too. With the support of their publishers, Greenwald and Poitras met Snowden in Hong Kong and embarked on a concerted plan to release the information in an intentional order.

A high school dropout, Snowden found in intelligence agencies some senior colleagues who valued his tech skills and offered the opportunity to rise quickly; he held senior positions while still in his twenties. But he became profoundly disturbed by what he saw: that the sprawling U.S. agencies were highly invasive, operating without the knowledge of the government, let alone ordinary citizens. He sensed the enormity of his situation but until pushed by Greenwald, said little about his motives. Until, that is, he commented that a person's worth is seen not in their beliefs but in what they do to defend them. His willingness to make huge sacrifices for beliefs developed over years of reading, playing video games, and watching the CIA and the NSA at work impressed Greenwald and further persuaded him of Snowden's authenticity.

The Guardian published Greenwald's story about the telephone giant Verizon's handing over metadata from millions of Americans under order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on June 6, 2013. It created a media uproar and huge political embarrassment, and was followed the very next day with the equally devastating disclosures about PRISM. Its obviously global scope—concerning the internet, not a national phone company—amplified the fallout. The rest, of course, is well known. Snowden's steady revelations through the journalists' conduits continue to astonish, disturb, and shake the NSA, governments, and ordinary citizens around the world. Greenwald himself warns not only of the imperiled internet but also of the democratic danger of media co-option. His book uncompromisingly demands honesty and courage in each related area as well as real responses from government.

One such response came quickly. What strikes one about The NSA Report is how closely its recommendations follow the Snowden script. It is clear that the authors, all seasoned experts in their fields, had the Snowden "backdrop" in mind, but their concern is longer term, to "create sturdy foundations for the future, safeguarding … liberty and security in a rapidly changing world." In a measured and well-informed way, their 46 recommendations tackle key areas from the limits of surveillance-reach to the security of personal data flowing through the systems.

Right from the start, the report recognizes that "security" may be thought of in many ways, and that the dominant definition as "national security" only rings bells in the vaguest way with majority populations. There is also a (Fourth Amendment) right of people to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" that requires vigilant care, and an expectation that when "security" is spoken it refers to personal safety as well as the protection of government institutions and borders. In line with this, the Report also connects "privacy" with "civil liberties," thus accepting immediately that the problem is not merely one of individual violations—important though they are—but a collective one of justice. In a strong sense, then, the Report leans towards developing a surveillance of care rather than a more abstract control.

The NSA Report cautions about the risk that "high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking." "Americans," they urge, "must never make the mistake of 'wholly trusting' our public officials." The agitated activist in Greenwald agrees, in more passionate prose. Thus has a crucially important debate been launched, one that demands the attention of all who care about an open internet and a fearless press, about personal freedoms and the common good, including those, one might say, who hear those echoes from long ago and far away of a "God who notices me" (Hagar in Genesis 16) and who cares about who is seen, or not, and why and how.

David Lyon directs the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he is professor of sociology, holds a Queen's Research Chair, and is cross-appointed as a professor in the Faculty of Law.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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