Politicians don't lose their jobs from accusations of softness on food poisoning or lightning strikes, but some lose their jobs from being accused of softness on terrorism (former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland comes to mind). Hence the massive and expensive exercise in barn-door closing known as airport security. Let us apply this tendency to the national surveillance debate.
"It is not rational to give up massive amounts of privacy and liberty to stay marginally safer from a threat that, however scary, endangers the average American far less than his or her daily commute," writes Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic, expressing a common view.
Another kind of loss of liberty comes when our tax dollars are spent on useless programs.
These considerations will be in the background as President Obama's newly resuscitated Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an agency whose existence previously was almost a secret itself, prepares recommendations on how and whether to relieve some of the secrecy around now-controversial national surveillance efforts. But one question still isn't being asked: With respect to the famous metadata surveillance, why is it conducted by a secret agency at all?
This is the program that anonymously collects data about electronic transactions—from the time, duration and numbers involved in a phone call, to email connections, to financial transactions—everything but the actual content. It may be that Americans have nothing to fear from computers raking through piles of anonymous data. The threat to liberty and privacy comes only when computers kick up red flags for an actual human being to look at, which now means an employee of an agency necessarily removed from popular oversight.
The biggest problem, then, with metadata surveillance may simply be that the wrong agencies are in charge of it. One particular reason why this matters is that the potential of metadata surveillance might actually be quite large but is being squandered by secret agencies whose narrow interest is only looking for terrorists.
Highway serial killers are enough of a problem that the FBI formed a task force devoted to them, its Highway Serial Killers Initiatives. Instead of finding a suspect and trying to tie him to bodies, could metadata help us quickly find suspects based on the locations of bodies?
Could metadata be used to alert us to the troubled recluse who suddenly starts buying guns and ammunition? Could it be used to raise the cost of organized crime, such as drug smuggling or product counterfeiting or identity theft, which obviously requires elements of organization, which means lots of electronic "transactions"?
One peculiarly bad argument that assails every crime-prevention strategy is that, if someone is determined to commit a crime, he will find a way. People differ in their degree of determination. Economics wouldn't exist if raising the cost of engaging in an activity—whether planning a shooting spree, organizing a drug ring or being a serial killer—didn't lessen our supply of these activities.
"Big data" is only as good as the algorithms used to find out things worth finding out. The efficacy and refinement of big-data techniques are advanced by repetition, by giving more chances to find something worth knowing. Bringing metadata out of its black box wouldn't only be a way to improve public trust in what government is doing. It would be a way to get more real value for society out of techniques that are being squandered on a fairly minor threat.
Bringing metadata out of the black box would open up new worlds of possibility—from anticipating traffic jams to locating missing persons after a disaster. It would also create an opportunity to make big data more consistent with the constitutional prohibition of unwarranted search and seizure. In the first instance, with the computer withholding identifying details of the individuals involved, any red flag could be examined by a law-enforcement officer to see, based on accumulated experience, whether the indication is of interest.
If so, a warrant could be obtained to expose the identities involved. If not, the record could immediately be expunged. All this could take place in a reasonably aboveboard, legal fashion, open to inspection in court when and if charges are brought or—this would be a good idea—a court is informed of investigations that led to no action.
Our guess is that big data techniques would pop up way too many false positives at first, and only considerable learning and practice would allow such techniques to become a useful tool. At the same time, bringing metadata surveillance out of the shadows would help the Googles, Verizons and Facebooks defend themselves from a wholly unwarranted suspicion that user privacy is somehow better protected by French or British or (heavens) Chinese companies from their own governments than U.S. data is from the U.S. government.
Most of all, it would allow these techniques to be put to work on solving problems that are actual problems for most Americans, which terrorism isn't.
A version of this article appeared July 24, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Metadata Liberation Movement.
