Safeguarding Our Privacy and Our Values in an Age of Mass Surveillance America’s mass surveillance programs, once secret, can no longer be ignored. While Edward Snowden began the process in 2013 with his leaks of top secret documents, the Obama administration’s own reforms have also helped bring the National Security Agency and its programs of signals intelligence collection out of the shadows. The real question is: What should we do about mass surveillance? Timothy Edgar, a long-time civil liberties activist who worked inside the intelligence community for six years during the Bush and Obama administrations, believes that the NSA’s programs are profound threat to the privacy of everyone in the world. At the same time, he argues that mass surveillance programs can be made consistent with democratic values, if we make the hard choices needed to bring transparency, accountability, privacy, and human rights protections into complex programs of intelligence collection. Although the NSA and other agencies already comply with rules intended to prevent them from spying on Americans, Edgar argues that the rules—most of which date from the 1970s—are inadequate for this century. Reforms adopted during the Obama administration are a good first step but, in his view, do not go nearly far enough. Edgar argues that our communications today—and the national security threats we face—are both global and digital. In the twenty first century, the only way to protect our privacy as Americans is to do a better job of protecting everyone’s privacy. Beyond Surveillance: Privacy, Mass Surveillance, and the Struggle to Reform the NSA explains both why and how we can do this, without sacrificing the vital intelligence capabilities we need to keep ourselves and our allies safe. If we do, we set a positive example for other nations that must confront challenges like terrorism while preserving human rights. The United States already leads the world in mass surveillance. It can lead the world in mass surveillance reform.

The crypto wars have raged for half a century. In the 1970s, digital privacy activists prophesied the emergence of an Orwellian State, made possible by computer-mediated mass surveillance. The antidote: digital encryption. The U.S. government warned encryption would not only prevent surveillance of law-abiding citizens, but of criminals, terrorists, and foreign spies, ushering in a rival dystopian future. Both parties fought to defend the citizenry from what they believed the most perilous threats. The government tried to control encryption to preserve its surveillance capabilities; privacy activists armed citizens with cryptographic tools and challenged encryption regulations in the courts. No clear victor has emerged from the crypto wars. Governments have failed to forge a framework to govern the, at times conflicting, civil liberties of privacy and security in the digital age—an age when such liberties have an outsized influence on the citizen–State power balance. Solving this problem is more urgent than ever. Digital privacy will be one of the most important factors in how we architect twenty-first century societies—its management is paramount to our stewardship of democracy for future generations. We must elevate the quality of debate on cryptography, on how we govern security and privacy in our technology-infused world. Failure to end the crypto wars will result in societies sleepwalking into a future where the citizen–State power balance is determined by a twentieth-century status quo unfit for this century, endangering both our privacy and security. This book provides a history of the crypto wars, with the hope its chronicling sets a foundation for peace.