Let's Talk About It

As recent revelations that the NSA’s subterfuge includes spying on allies, as in the case of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and on ourselves, via snooping into the data centers of Google and Yahoo sans court approval, the old adage that “We have met the enemy… and he is us,” has taken on new layers of meaning. More noteworthy, if not at all surprising, is the fact that in my day to day travels since this news hit I haven’t heard a peep about it from anyone, making us, as in the case of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars we collectively discussed only slightly more frequently than the Spanish-American War, our own worst enemies all over again. The few people with whom I have broken the code of silence by asking their opinion have, in so many words, asked me how I could be so daft to express surprise at the headline “Spy agency caught spying.”

I am left wondering why almost no one is thinking about the implications of this, or, if they do stop and think, write the whole thing off as spies being spies, as if this were no different than Manny being Manny or any other version of boys being boys. It may, perhaps, have something to do with the rate at which we broadcast the minutiae of our lives on social media; what can the NSA uncover that I haven’t already posted on Facebook? But it is more deeply rooted in the fact that the vast majority of us wake up in the morning and get the kids off to school, then go to work to make a living so that when the kids get home from school there is food on the table. Even those of us with political leanings towards the outer limits of the bell curve have difficulty imagining that the government could unearth anything more damning than a pattern of checking out books at the library which call into question the current trajectory. My Tea Partying next door neighbor may be checking out the books accusing Obama of socialism while I check out the books wishing he were, but we both have bills to pay. And in a country where credit is as omnipresent as death and taxes, what could be more American than that?

But it is my experience of the credit industry that gives me pause. My wife and I were recently alerted by our credit card company that someone had gotten hold of our credit card numbers and used them to make on-line purchases. The credit card company contacted us because they knew, quite accurately, that my wife and I would never in a million years have made the purchase in question. This is, quite simply, the practice of profiling. And the credit card companies are batting a thousand in their profiling of me and my true love. They have signed off on every single purchase but one in the ten years we have shared an account, even during the years when Jen and I were vying to see whether she could trump my accumulation of tennis racquets (always bought in pairs) with her collection of baby wearing wraps. Maybe the fact that I purchase the same twelve items at Trader Joe’s every single weekend (the gluten free frozen pancakes make up for what they lack in texture with an accurate flavor reminiscent of the idea at the core of the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter brand identity) makes me an easy mark for the credit card company algorithms, but one hundred percent is one hundred percent. Socrates’ advice to know thyself rings a little hollow when MasterCard already knows me better than I ever could.

Now if my credit card company has this much of a bead on me, what might the NSA have gleaned from my internet footprints? I am reminded of the Tom Cruise vehicle Minority Report, based on the near future sci-fi story by Philip K. Dick, in which police apprehend criminals prior to the committing of crimes, based on the input of psychics. It is all too easy to imagine a near future in which the NSA, relying, in lieu of psychics, on the pattern seeking software it surely already uses on your Google account, begins making accusations of threat prior to crimes, the precedence for which already exists in the form of the preemptive strikes taken in the aforementioned Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the everyday experience of racial profiling by Black men everywhere. Now imagine taking the stand to defend yourself against a District Attorney who, like my credit card company, is never wrong. In the words of Maryland’s own Stephen L. Miles, criminal defense attorney extraordinaire, “Let’s talk about it,” lest Miles and his ilk be rendered permanently extraneous (making “Save the lawyers” the new “Save the whales”).