 Data journalist Jamie Ballard reported on a recent YouGov poll entitled “Privacy and Government Surveillance.” The conceptual divide among respondents appears to be whether someone is regarded as a public or a private figure. Clear majorities condoned monitoring the online activities of the following groups, who are either public by nature or of public concern:
To be clear, the survey question didn’t ask if government workers and politicians should be surveilled because they are under sufficient suspicion of a crime to justify a probable cause warrant. Nope, they are spy-worthy simply by virtue of being public figures. Those polled do believe that private citizens should be afforded more protection, with majorities agreeing that an ongoing criminal investigation is required in order to justify monitoring someone’s digital activity. Still, what made us do a spit take is why so many people deem it acceptable for federal spy agencies to surveil the online activities of a president, or Members of Congress, or governors, at will. This seems at odds with another finding in the same poll, that 71 percent of Americans are concerned that surveillance powers could be used by the U.S. government to target political opponents or suppress dissent. So what’s going on? It may partially reflect widespread disillusionment with leaders in Washington, D.C. and many states. But that doesn’t come close to explaining the reasons behind this response. PPSA and others not only oppose warrantless surveillance of politicians, we advocate for enhanced guardrails when it comes to legal surveillance of political candidates and elected officials. We believe those protections should be extended to journalists as well. This is not because politicians and journalists are special people with special rights, by any means. The reason is more profound than that. When a politician or a journalist is targeted, that act necessarily involves the political and speech rights of the many Americans who voted for that officeholder or who follow that journalist. Monitoring of the online activity of politicians and journalists is an attack on a free political system itself. Such were the grievous wrongs when the FBI investigated Donald Trump in 2016 on allegations the Bureau itself knew were disproven, and when the executive branch secretly pulled communications of Members of Congress and aides of both parties in 2017. Republicans and Democrats both had reason to be alarmed. Our intelligence agencies have a history of secretly overseeing their overseers. Perhaps this one result in the YouGov poll is just an outlier. But it merits our attention. Americans need to appreciate that underhanded surveillance of politicians is actually an attack on them. Civil libertarians clearly have a lot of work to do in the realm of public education. Comments are closed.
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