It’s hard to argue that any individual has much privacy these days. Our data is collected constantly. If we want the companies to stop collecting that data, we need the government to regulate this corporate hunger. But the US government doesn’t seem to have the appetite to regulate data collection practices.

With tech companies getting a free pass to collect our data, it would stand to reason that the US government doesn’t value data privacy. So, we should have access to the government’s data, right?

The Open Government movement is a governing doctrine. It states that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.

The origins of open government arguments go back to the time of the European Enlightenment, with the debates about the proper construction of a then nascent democratic society.

We don’t have an open government. We often learn about the things our government would rather keep private through freedom of information acts and leaks. We have to pry it from their hands. Sometimes we can’t, and we rely on hackers to pick the lock.

The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966. That’s where the term FOIA comes from. The law requires the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States government upon request.

The Electronic Freedom of Information Act, or E-FOIA passed in 1996, thirty years later. It says that all agencies are required by statute to make certain types of records, created by the agency on or after November 1, 1996, available electronically.

Since the E-FOIA has become law, administrations have pushed back to keep records private.

It’s a dangerous world, and I get that terrorists and foreign governments would love to have access to a bunch of classified material. I get that some information shouldn’t be available, but as a whole, our government would rather have us kept in the dark.

In 2001, George W. Bush issued an executive order restricting access to the records of former presidents. That access was restored in 2009 by Barack Obama. That same year, Barack Obama issued an executive order to retroactively classify certain types of information as relevant to national security after it had been requested.

The way I read that, is that GW said “don’t look at any of my stuff” and Obama said ‘well, just not some of it.” That seems reasonable as long as at some point, it eventually becomes public.

The government works on behalf of the people, not the other way around.

In 2013, the Associated Press uncovered several federal agencies where staff regularly used fictitious identities and secret or unlisted email accounts to conduct government business and get around FOIA requests. That reeks of officials doing something that the public wouldn’t agree with.

In some cases, the government demanded enormous fees for records that should have been available for minimal cost. That’s another way of saying poor people shouldn’t be able to question what the government is doing.

The Center for Effective Government analyzed 15 federal agencies that receive the most FOIA requests. They concluded that agencies are struggling to implement public disclosure rules. Why?

I don’t want to sound paranoid, but these efforts to block records from becoming public is all the more suspect when data gets leaked.

So let’s look at the internet’s go to spot for leaks. WikiLeaks.

It’s an international non-profit organization that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media provided by anonymous sources.

It was founded in 2006 and became a household name in 2010 when they published documents provided by Chelsea Manning.

But lately it has drawn more criticism for its absence of whistleblowing, and looks more like a puppet of Russia.

That’s due to its founder, Julian Assange. He lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for 7 years to avoid charges of sexual assault and extradition to the United States.

Assange has always been polarizing, but the 2016 US election definitely shifted public opinion on him for the worse. Before the 2016 US election, WikiLeaks felt like David vs Goliath.

The first strike against the US came with the publication of Collateral Murder in 2010.

The video footage shows an airstrike from July 2007 in Baghdad.

Two American helicopters fire on a group of 10 men.

Two were Reuters journalists there to photograph an American Humvee under attack by the Mahdi Army.

The pilots mistook their cameras for weapons. The helicopters also fired on a van.

The people in the van had stopped to help the wounded members of the first group.

Two children in the van were wounded and their father was killed.

Yes, this could be used as propaganda against the United States.

It’s release would be damaging. It was damaging when it was released.

But hiding the incident from the public from the outset just allows the individuals involved to escape accountability.

This was one part of what is known as the War Logs.

In July 2010, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel published over 90 thousand documents regarding the war in Afghanistan.

This was followed in October 2010 by over three hundred ninety thousand classified military reports which became known as the Iraq War Logs.

And we can’t forget about Guantanamo Bay, which if you’ve been living under a rock, is a prison camp established by the United States as part of the War on Terror. In addition to the War Logs, Manning also leaked 779 formerly secret documents relating to the detainees at the prison camp.

Media reports on the documents noted that more than 150 innocent Afghans and Pakistanis were held for years without charges. The oldest detainee was 89. The youngest was 14 years old. There are still inmates being held in Guantanamo Bay that have yet to receive a trial.

Am I foolish to think that holding children without charges in a prison camp is going to create more terrorists?

War ain’t pretty. but perhaps more embarrassing for the US government was CableGate.

This cache of documents included over 250 thousand state department cables documents written by 271 American embassies and consulates in 180 countries starting in 2010.

This is the leak that many see as the catalyst for the Arab Spring. It made many Americans deeply question the War on Terror.

While hailed as a hero by some, Chelsea Manning was considered a traitor by others.

She was sentenced to 35 years in prison under the Espionage Act.

Her sentence was commuted by Barack Obama after 7 years.

Then came Edward Snowden.

Snowden is a former CIA employee. He didn’t use WikiLeaks. He worked with the American journalist Glenn Greenwald to leak a vast amount of information relating to secret government surveillance programs.

Al Gore said that Snowden

“clearly violated the law so you can’t say OK, what he did is all right. It’s not. But what he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the U.S. constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed…”

The first revelation was a program called PRISM. It allowed for court-approved access to Americans’ Google and Yahoo accounts. Email, search history, location history, and everything else Google has access to.

Another program revealed was Tempora, a system used by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). It buffered most internet communications that are extracted from fiber-optic cables. It literally archived most internet traffic at the packet level to be processed and searched at a later time.

But perhaps the scariest program was XKeyscore. A vague analytical tool that, according to Snowden, allows for the collection of “almost anything done on the internet.”

No warrant needed.

Snowden has said of XKeyscore, that

“sitting at my desk I could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Snowden Interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1-Y3IzVqdw)

All that was needed was a personal email address.

All of these programs were justified by the government as needed for the War on Terror. A war started after the shock of 9/11, but prolonged by an administration that lied to the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And once the technology existed, it was too tempting to use for other purposes.

NSA employees spied on their own love interests.

They tracked the online sexual activity of people they termed radicalizers in order to discredit them.

They spied on oil giant Petrobas.

They spied on UNICEF and Medecins du Monde.

Was all of that to protect us from terrorists?

The NSA also planned to infect millions of computers with malware to gather even more data.

So I’ll ask again, do we live in a disciplinary society?

Are our digital lives a panopticon?

There is an unquenchable thirst for data, both in private corporations and our governments.

These institutions have convinced themselves that this data is essential. but just as important as the data you’ve collected is the data that you can’t collect.

Ronald Coase, a British Economist has said, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”

This is especially important to think about when considering systemic racism.

If this concerns you, I highly recommend checking out Data for Black Lives, founded by Yeshimabeit Milner (https://d4bl.org/)