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"The most surprising thing to me about this week\u2019s revelations about the NSA wiretapping calls on Verizon and the agency\u2019s PRISM program is that people are surprised.\nThe NSA has had the authority to monitor domestic calls since 2008 (before that, it could only legally tap international calls). The program has not been a secret and has been written about in USA Today and Wired. The fact that the NSA is at least looking into using the same authority to monitor activity on the web seems like a plausible extension of that program.\nSEE ALSO: If a Google Employee Dies, Spouse Gets Half Pay for 10 Years\n\nYet before you get up in arms about this latest development, consider the fact that every day you're giving away reams of data about yourself anyway. If you use Google and Gmail, it\u2019s likely Google knows a great deal about what you do on the web. Of course, there are ways of disengaging this type of monitoring but the default is to let Google follow you around the web and I would guess most people leave it that way. \nIf you use Facebook, which you probably do if you\u2019re reading this, then Facebook has intimate knowledge of your preferences and the people in your life. Recently the company even gained the ability to possibly take into account your offline shopping as well and serve you up to advertisers (in a double-blind fashion) for better targeting. \nThe monitoring doesn\u2019t end when you step away from your computer, though. Whether you use an iPhone, Android device, BlackBerry or Windows Phone, there\u2019s a good chance Google and Facebook are tracking you there, too, as are the various apps on your phone. \nIf you walk around a major metropolitan area you\u2019re also likely to be photographed by a video surveillance camera of the sort that identified the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects recently. You may recall that those images helped ultimately capture those suspects (one dead, one alive). Think of the NSA programs as the online equivalent of those cameras. The vast majority of the info will never be used for anything, but a very small percentage may be immensely helpful. \nAs The Wall Street Journal notes, data mining is only effective if you have a large swath of data \u201Cso the NSA must sweep broadly to learn what is normal and define the deviations.\u201D The WSJ compares it to the freezes that credit card companies use \u201Cwhen, say, a New Yorker goes on a shopping spree in Phoenix\" (Yes, credit card companies have reams and reams of data about you as well). \nThat spin may sound a bit too credulous to some, especially in light of the IRS\u2019s recent targeting of Tea Party groups and the Obama Administration\u2019s heavy-handed treatment of The Associated Press, but the same charge can be used against opponents of such snooping as well. After all, the putative goal is to avoid terrorist attacks. Even though many members of the public are upset about what the NSA is up to, I can guarantee many more would be much more upset about a 9/11 type attack, which would inevitably trigger this type of data collection if it didn\u2019t already exist. \nThis is a no-win situation for the federal government. If it tries to employ data mining on a grand scale, it gets accused of overreach. If it backs off and there\u2019s another attack, then it will be accused of not using its legal authority to protect the public. \nWhich would you choose? \nImage via Getty, Oli Scarff"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/06/07/nsa-monitoring-oped/>