President Obama: End Unrestricted Data Access

President Barack Obama, as the top leader in the US, is essentially caught between a rock and that proverbial hard place.  The untrammeled surveillance of phone conversations, from American citizens to foreign leaders, turned suddenly into an egg-on-the-face revelation, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel, an apparent friend of the US, was among those subjected to this surveillance.  

The President is inviolably accountable to the people, despite being the one elected American with the most  political power.  So he has to allay their - our - concerns.  But frankly I don't have a lot of confidence in what he says.  The secretive, underhanded nature of what the government did, under his watch, doesn't quite reassure me that privacy or trust will be restored by the measures he spoke to last Friday.  

Big Data is the talk in business and technology, and what's collected about us from social media, internet searches, credit card transactions and so forth are far more staggering, I imagine, than what's pilfered from our phone calls.  So like Google, for instance, the government will find ways to get whatever they need or want about us.

What to do?

I began this article by acknowledge the fundamental dilemma President Obama is in.  To counter terrorism, the government must monitor.  To protect us, and prevent another 9/11, the NSA and CIA must conduct surveillance.  Yes, of course.  But technology and algorithms have become so sophisticated, that, I imagine, officials can draw on more targeted and more effective surveillance, without recourse to collecting bulk telephone data.  

As it were, it gives me the impression that these government agencies don't really have a clue on what they're looking for and-or how to find it.  So, why not take a shot gun approach, they seem to have decided on, to date.  Clearly bulk data collection will no longer do.  

In the end, I appreciate the President speaking to an issue that is beyond any one person to speak to and indeed to resolve.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD