It’s based on the theory that there are only six degrees of separation between any two people in the world and you can type any famous person, past or present, into the search engine and it will tell you how that person is connected to the actor Kevin Bacon and by how many degrees.
The game is fun and harmless, but with 58% of adult Americans using Facebook, it illustrates just how closely we are all linked in the age of high tech and social media.
That means that as Americans even if we don’t personally use Facebook we likely know someone who does. So it should concern us all when the site released its ‘Global Government Requests Report’ last Friday and we learned that in the last half of 2015 government requests for private account data had increased by 13% globally. The U.S. alone had 19,235 requests that included 30,041 Facebook accounts. One might find this unsurprising given the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, which Facebook sites as a leading cause, but the report also included this new little piece of information,
“For the first time, we are also reporting information about non-disclosure orders: approximately 60% of the requests we received for user data from authorities in the United States contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user.”
In case you needed a stark confirmation, post Edward Snowden, that the U.S. government is spying on its citizens, there you have it. And this isn’t the obscure phone metadata collection that we also know the government has been collecting since the PATRIOT Act was passed, it’s our opinions and conversations that we can choose to make as private or public as we want. As such we have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
A favorite line that gets touted by elected officials whenever these revelations come out is that if you aren’t doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about. By using this specious argument the federal government has enacted laws like the PATRIOT Act and FISA amendments to encroach more and more into personal and private interactions and lull too many Americans into giving away their rights in slow increments.
Rooting out potential terrorists or other bad actors can be done without the government spying on and collecting information on vast numbers of its citizens simply because they have some degree of social media connection. I will work to end these secretive data collection programs and ensure that Americans need not fear that their government is spying on them.