May 14^th, 2006

The Bush administrations collecting of phone call records on millions of Americans is a dire threat to our freedom of association. What they appear to be doing is mapping social networks. They want to know who talks to whom, and from that they can build a map of our society. One of the benefits to homeland security is that by simple linking of phone call data (or email or instant messages) to demographic data the administration can identify social groupings in considerable detail, like the Muslim community in South Carolina and their associates, or people who associate with members of some activist group. This is much more efficient than sending people with cameras to events and then trying to identify participants from their pictures. The computer does all the work of determining who associates with whom.

They are already investigating U.S. citizens who have committed no crimes, but are selected because they have openly criticized the government or been a part of a group who openly opposes government policy. A recent example in a press release from the ACLU is the disrupting of a trip by freelance journalist David Lippman to report on the free trade meetings in Miami. His truck was impounded and equipment damaged because he was an “activist with history”. In South Carolina homeland security receives millions of dollars. They must be investigating someone. If you belong to an organization to which the people they are investigating belong or if you receive a phone call from these “activists with history”, you may be the next in line.

An additional issue with this collection of information on citizens is that the information would be invaluable to politicians running for office or officials who want to identify the social network of people who oppose their own interest. What if you are a politician running for office or if you are a government agency that wants to influence the electoral process, this information would be invaluable. You would know how to target campaigns and would be able to identify the most well connected people in any demographic segments. This information could be used to sway public opinion or to disrupt organizations or the lives of people who pose a threat.

So how would this information be helpful in controlling public opinion? A group that is attempting to move public opinion would be able to influence significantly fewer people. Social maps follow a clustering that follows what is called a scale-free network. In a social mapping, there are relative few people who have a large number of contacts while most of us have significanly fewer. These well-connected people have a much stronger impact on social opinion. The social map would tell them who the communicators are, who has the most friends, etc. and attempt a word-of-mouth campaign with much greater success. By persuading these few people, or diminishing their influence by discreding them in some way. And the campaign could be done entirely outside the public media.

If times get worse, discontent increases, and public fear of chaos is raised, the networks of discontented people will already be known, and they will not need to get lists of memberships of the ACLU or any other dissenting group, they will already have the information they need to identify people who oppose them. If Senator Joe McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover had had access to this kind of information, our society would be less free today. They could have rounded up people without Senate hearings.

The collection of information of this nature will certainly result in a loss of freedoms guaranteed in our Bill of Rights. It inhibits the freedom to associate with whomever we want and will give undue power to people who control this information. Having our government collect this information of this nature is a threat to the freedoms provided by our founding fathers. The biggest threats to our freedoms lie not from abroad, but from within.