American Civil Liberties Union

Later Thursday night Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI) filed an important amendment to the Senate cybersecurity legislation to begin to reign in the information the federal government collects on all of us. We don’t think about it much but the federal government collects an enormous amount of personal information on a regular basis: in order for citizens to receive benefits and services, to exercise fundamental rights like voting or petitioning the government, for licensing everything from guns to businesses, for employment, education and for many types of health care. In short this information collection is nearly ubiquitous in American life.

I recently came across a very nice essay on “The Stupidity of Computers” by David Auerbach, which is really much more interesting than that truism of a headline might suggest.

Auerbach starts with the observation that computers “are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation.” The point is a commonplace, almost clichéd one—but Auerbach quickly builds on it, slowly moving to a stunning punch line of a thesis that is thought-provoking and fresh.

Senator Charles Grassley got it right: officials at the Food and Drug Administration “have absolutely no business reading the private e-mails of their employees.”

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy story detailing how the FDA monitored the communications of its own scientists, including communications with members of Congress, lawyers and journalists. Those scientists had blown the whistle on what they believed were flawed internal procedures that led to the approval of unsafe medical imaging devices. The FDA engaged in a massive email monitoring campaign to read their communications—including their private, personal emails. The emails that the FDA collected included those of a former member of Senator Grassley’s staff, presumably because he had exchanged messages with one or more of the targeted FDA officials.

Ron and Rand Paul’s manifesto on “The Technology Revolution,” released the other day, is unexpectedly incomplete, focusing most of its animus not on government security and police agencies, but on what they call “collectivists,” by which they mean those who advance attempts to “regulate competition, infrastructure, privacy and intellectual property.” I think they mean us.