Make privacy part of the transatlantic trade talks

[Commentary] One of the US constitution’s great strengths is its strong protection for privacy against government intrusion. One troubling feature, therefore, of the recently revealed collaboration between the National Security Agency and America’s global information providers is that the government has found a way to bypass the constitution. It uses weaknesses in legal protections that, in both the US and Europe, are intended to allow private companies to keep records on their clients while shielding citizens from prying by their governments.

American law privileges consumer sovereignty over human dignity, so it provides weak privacy protection against snooping by companies. They may create extensive dossiers on customers, and because they provide services globally but have systems anchored in the US, those data are subject to American government observation as well. Each time details emerge about programs adopted in the post-9/11 constitutional panic, such as torture or indefinite detention, they expose the assurances of their critical value as vacuous at best, and usually duplicitous. We need a transparent debate for our own sakes. In having it, we will be doing our bit to help innocent subjects caught in the dragnets of US programs around the world.

[Benkler is a director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society]