What does it take to make tech companies, Dianne Feinstein, Germans, Indonesians, and John Kerry lose patience with the National Security Agency’s practices? Everyone unhappy with the N.S.A. is unhappy in his or her own way. (The Indonesians, for example, are angry because we helped the Australians spy on them.) As for those who are happy with it—there are too few in that pool to produce epiphanies.
The tech companies are also a distinct case because they have been variously cast as collaborators in mass data collection, dupes, willfully blind instruments, dishonest brokers, purveyors of compromised products, targets, innocent victims—everything but clever. On Thursday, six of them (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo) sent a letter to several senators asking, as they have in various ways since documents leaked by Edward Snowden began appearing, for more transparency, and the ability to be straight with their customers. They added that maybe it was time for surveillance practices to “be reformed to include substantial enhancements to privacy protections and appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms.” This came a day after the companies and the rest of us got to see what looked like a doodle you’d draw in class, except that the N.S.A. had labelled it “top secret” and given it the title “Current Efforts - Google.” The Washington Post got the document from Snowden. It showed, schematically, how the N.S.A. had gained access to Google’s (and Yahoo’s) data centers, and with them potentially years of customer information. Near the center of the diagram, next to the words “SSL Added and removed here!”—S.S.L. is a form of encryption—some crack N.S.A. operative has added a smiley face:
According to the Post, “Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. ‘I hope you publish this,’ one of them said.”
The publishing was proper; so was the explosion, which was probably overdue: the tech companies needed to look hard at their relation to the government, and one of the valuable effects of the Snowden papers was to push them to it. Breaking into the data centers is a major practical issue, but there is every reason to be enraged by the smiley face, too. The aesthetics—the curling, cutesy bits of spy pride—matter, as a gauge of judgment and entitlement, self-awareness and respect, assignments of subservience. None of those things are just for show. It’s like not only abusing a prisoner but making him wear a Raggedy Ann wig. The N.S.A. has an enormous power; one would like the people who might read one’s mail to also have some delicacy. Snickering is an injury, too.
The whole smiley slap in the face is an example of how very reckless the N.S.A. has been. It has acted as though there never would be a cost—in private-sector coöperation, in alliances, in public trust—to anything it did. But there have to be costs, or there are no limits. That the Agency may be paying up now is not Snowden’s fault; it’s to his clear credit. (Snowden is still in Russia, perhaps with a new job, and the odd visit from a German politician.) The Guardian (which has also beautifully parodied the Google slide with what one might call metadoodles) has an interactive package up explaining how various programs we’ve learned about lately work together—something that politicians from Obama to Feinstein have suggested they didn’t quite get. Kerry said that he and the President had learned about things that had been operating on “an automatic pilot,” sometimes “inappropriately.” Perhaps the N.S.A. could put some of the Guardian’s diagrams onto classified slides, for its own instruction. When the agents scroll through them, will they smile?
Photograph by Susan Walsh/AP. N.S.A. diagram via the Washington Post.
