On October 6, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners program aired a terrific special, "Privacy Lost" written and produced by Martin Smith from the US public broadcaster PBS's Frontline program.
UPDATE: The program we saw in Australia was a condensed version of PBS's two part The United States of Secrets from May 2014.
Here we have a compelling demonstration of the importance and primacy of Collection Limitation for protecting our privacy.
About the program
Martin Smith summarises brilliantly what we know about the NSA's secret surveillance programs, thanks to the revelations of Ed Snowden, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman; he holds many additional interviews with Julia Angwin (author of "Dragnet Nation"), Chris Hoofnagle (UC Berkeley), Steven Levy (Wired), Christopher Soghoian (ACLU) and Tim Wu ("The Master Switch"), to name a few. Even if you're thoroughly familiar with the Snowden story, I highly recommend "Privacy Lost". I'll update this blog in the next few days with a link to the ABC's downloadable version of the program.
The program is a ripping re-telling of Snowden's expose, against the backdrop of George W. Bush's PATRIOT Act and the mounting suspicions through the noughties of NSA over-reach. There are freshly told accounts of the intrigues, of secret optic fibre splitters installed very early on in AT&T's facilities, scandals over National Security Letters, and the very rare case of the web hosting company Calyx who challenged their constitutionality (and yet today, with the letter withdrawn, remains unable to tell us what the FBI was seeking). The real theme of Smith's take on surveillance then emerges, when me looks at the rise of data-driven businesses -- first with search, then advertising and social networking -- and the "data wars" between Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The interplay between government surveillance and digital businesses is the most important part of the Snowden epic and it receives the proper emphasis here. The depth and breadth of surveillance conducted by the private sector, and the insights revealed about what people might be up to creates irresistible opportunities for the intelligence agencies. Hoofnagle tells us how the FBI loves Facebook. And we see the discovery of how the NSA exploits the tracking that’s done by the ad companies, most notably Google’s “PREF” cookie.
One of the peak moments in "Privacy Lost" comes when Gellman and his specialist colleague Ashkan Soltani present their evidence of the PREF cookie to Google - offering an opportunity for the company to comment before the story is to break in the Washington Post. The article ran on December 13, 2013; we're told it was then the true depth of the privacy problem was revealed.
My point of view