Snowden's interview with the Guardian on PRISM

Here is the transcript of the leaker (Snowden) interview with Greenwald: http://www.policymic.com/articles/47355/edward-snowden-interview-transcript-full-text-read-the-guardian-s-entire-interview-with-the-man-who-leaked-prism/612597

This quote from Snowden was most salient to me:

"Because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."

In this context, it's very much a civil rights issue. Contrary to the gov't claims, Snowden says that the NSA-CIA is definitely snooping on domestic traffic and US citizens, not just foreigners suspected of terrorism by court order. But what if in the future the gov't focuses on other/more crimes? Contrary to our 1st Amend. right to free association, what if by accident you are at the wrong place at the wrong time or mistaken for a suspect (i.e. Ted Kennedy on the no-fly list)? Then the gov't has access to all your past telco and online history, and through the lens of presumed suspicion, may be able to use that data out of context to build a narrative that paints you in a very negative light. Because as we all know, if we cherry-pick various online actions from anyone, we can make a case that person X holds extreme beliefs, is mentally unstable, and could be a danger to the nation (think McCarthy meets Big Data). And the drone program makes it even more disturbing. Supposedly no US citizen can be secretly sentenced to death on US soil. But what if we travel overseas, and we are mis-identified as a terror plotter? Whoops, our bad! What impartial party is checking the data and findings before the final call? The investigator/prosecutor can't be an unbiased auditor too. And of course the suspect doesn't get to present his/her side of the case until it's too late. Heck even with our developed legal system, we erroneously incriminate, incarcerate, or even kill innocent Americans each year. So I have real concerns about judging people in secret using only "hearsay" online data.

We know gov'ts have agendas and may unfairly target certain people/groups (i.e. IRS scandal that we discussed). Therefore how can we trust them to manage these secret, sensitive, expansive data tools responsibly and ethically, with no one to play Devil's Advocate and defend those under suspicion (even people that "seem guilty")? I work in data analysis, and mistakes/wrong conclusions happen ALL THE TIME among pretty smart people. Humans want to confirm their own beliefs, and will massage/filter data and their own reasoning to get there. Like the problems in scientific research, to be truly rigorous you should use data to find all the ways your theory could be wrong, not the other way around. Databases are not perfect either, even Google's. What if a digit is switched here and there (i.e. Rogoff's "coding errors"), showing that you regularly call Pakistan instead of Paris? You can't perform QC on every data point of material, and a program of PRISM's scale is probably producing terabytes of data every day.

Frankly all these concerns can also be applied to the tech-telco companies that are the custodians of our data, and we have no choice but trust them (that is another debate for another day). Though at least with those firms, we do have channels for legal redress if they wrong us (even though it's very hard to subpoena evidence and beat their crack legal teams). Companies have messed up, apologized, and changed their practices (Google pulling out of Mainland China, Facebook terms of use, etc.). With orgs like the NSA and CIA, there is no oversight and redress, despite claims of "Congressional monitoring." The spooks show Congress only what they want them to see.