Sunday, July 20, 2014: 5:00 pm (Manning): We live in a surveillance state. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have access to a huge amount of data about us, enabling them to learn intimate, private details about our lives. In part, the ease with which they can obtain such information reflects the fact that our laws have failed to keep up with advances in technology. However, privacy enhancing technologies can offer real protections even when the law does not. That intelligence agencies like the NSA are able to collect records about every telephone call made in the United States or engage in the bulk surveillance of Internet communications is only possible because so much of our data is transmitted in the clear. The privacy enhancing technologies required to make bulk surveillance impossible and targeted surveillance more difficult already exist. We just need to start using them.

Christopher Soghoian