There’s a theory among economists called the broken window theory. It goes like this: if I throw a brick through the plate glass window of the store below, I’m actually improving—according to some—the economy. Why? Well, a cop will have to come and arrest me (or investigate the incident), and an employee will have to come to secure the store (that’s overtime, which he’ll spend at the mall), a boarding-up service will be called, a new glass window installed. My toss of a brick has caused a lot of money to be spent, and so is wonderful for the economy.
The problem? All that money could have been spent on teaching a kid to read, researching how to eliminate cancer, and do a host of other useful things. We don’t get anything of value from a broken window.
And I’m beginning to think that our obsession with security is nothing more than that old American paranoia that we do so well. That would be fine, but is it worth spending 53 billion dollars, as we did in fiscal 2012?
Maybe it’s time to say it—the rest of the world, or at least much of it, has lived with terrorism for a long time. The British had the IRA, Spain has ETA—every country has its enemies. And it might be worth it to spend some money guarding against terrorism—but shouldn’t we at least do it well? Is there any reason to think that data mining will make us safer?
I think what will make us safer is to stop dropping drones on civilians in places like Yemen. I also think that doing intelligence the old-fashioned way, instead of relying on the bells and whistles of technology, would yield more results.
And it’s curious—how did a 29 year-old dropout get a job paying $200,000 a year?
Well, the New York Times has the answer—security companies are desperate to get people who can run their sophisticated systems. And that means kids, nerds, geeks.
And apparently, also according to the Times, Snowden was a classic geek—he refused to chat with neighbors; he spent endless hours with his computer. That, says one Time’s columnist, is the problem: too many kids are growing up in a world mediated with technology. They’ve lost the ability to interact in person with the world. And they’re increasingly isolating themselves, and falling prey to paranoia and libertarianism.
Might be. But I’m not so sure that that’s all there is to it. As I understand neurology today, the current thinking is that the brain is still growing at age thirty. In that case, Snowden, with his 29 years, is at the very end of what we called adolescence.
Which means that he is thinking abstractly, not concretely (as he did when he was a child) or as adults do.
Remember that time of your life when you branded your mother a hypocrite because she had said, “sure, you don’t have to go to church, if you don’t believe in God,” and then there she was, begging you to go to church just because her mother was visiting and she was too tired to argue with her mother whom she couldn’t stand anyway?
It’s a very principled time of life, young adulthood, which is why it’s also a time a lot of zealots are made. So I’m not sure that technology has created Snowden, though it certainly played a part.
It’s also easy to see why Snowden is concerned, especially when confronted with headlines like this, in the liberal New York Times:
Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy
Guys? Are you seriously telling me that we cannot know what programs and activities our government is engaged in, because that would breach secrecy and thus endanger us?
Look, do you think our enemies don’t know, or operate under the presumption, that we are carrying out domestic espionage? Did any al Qaeda operative wake up this morning and say, “wow, I’ll have to think about using my cell phone, now that the US….?”
It’s screwy, any way you look at it. There’s also the fact that this is a contractor, who has access—according to him—to vast sources of information. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that even giving access has been outsourced to third parties. So Booz Allen has decided who could look at my telephone use.
And inevitably, politics comes into play. The coauthor of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is horrified that the act is being used in this way. Well, yesterday I read the letter he wrote in The Guardian, and very virtuous it seemed. However, the Times this morning threw a little ice water on that with a link to an editorial from 2005:
The House's Abuse of Patriotism
So it’s another mess, though an interesting one. One last thought—remember what I said about the young thinking abstractly, ideologically, reading to sacrifice anything for their ideals? Well, here’s the woman Snowden left behind….
