Scientia potentia est

Like Willow, I was interested in the government stepping in on the free exchange of knowledge ranging from Louis the XIII and Napoleon’s “cabinet noir” to the Patriot act in the U.S. that was implemented post-9/11. The Patriot Act, as most of us probably know allow for “Enhanced Surveillance Procedures” under the act’s Title II which authorizes the interception of “wire, oral, and electronic communications for the production of evidence of (1) specified chemical weapons or terrorism offenses; and (2) computer fraud and abuse.” Of course, this is open to all sorts of interpretations and I'm sure its been used under what some might consider to be false pretenses. Also, while I'm sure Louis' spies were good at their jobs, it would probably be a lot easier to notice if a letter was tampered with than detecting a tap on a phone line or someone else reading your email.

Unless you expected someone to be doing something like that. It is interesting that I couldn't find any information on whether postal communication can be searched as well. Perhaps it's not seen as as great of an issue, considering it's no longer one of the likely forms of communication; agendas must happen quickly to be successful after all, and buying a stamp takes longer than sending an email these days.

The question I have, is what does the Black Cabinet and the Patriot Act change? By having the ability to root through mass communication to potentially uncover conspiracies actually preserve the government and/or security? I would argue no, as potential conspirators eventually become aware of these tactics and find a way around them. For example, five Americans who were arrested and convicted in Pakistan for acts of terrorism earlier this year were able to navigate around Patriot act filters by communicating with their Al-Queda contact through a shared Yahoo email account. They would write a message and save it in a "Drafts" folder for the other person to read. Since the messages were never sent anywhere, it would have been impossible to intercept them without running word filters on every Yahoo email account.

Of course, I'm ignoring the crimes that do get intercepted and stopped due (in part) to the Patriot act. Likewise, the Black Cabinet may have also caught its fair share of conspiracies. But at what point does governmental information gathering cross the line from useful to paranoid and extraneous? And how do we know the motives of the people (or computer) behind the lens?