Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (review)

The War on Terror continues to be fought on many battlefields but nowhere has its impact been more dramatic than in the realm of electronic surveillance. Susan Landau guides her readers through a succession of battles as law enforcement and national security entities struggle to cope with new technologies, adversaries, and laws. These battles have left the security of our modern information infrastructure weakened by purposely built-in surveillance tools that provide hackers ready-made access to communications networks. Landau also chronicles how the United States has exercised poor oversight over access to these systems of surveillance by law enforcement and the intelligence community.

To situate the uninitiated reader, Landau begins by giving a knowledgeable primer on cryptography, telecommunications technology, and the internet. The book continues methodically to examine surveillance and security through a prism of the histories of communication technology, policy, and law. It provides a solid foundation for understanding the very broad and complex range of issues that come together in this area. Landau is an excellent guide, describing how a variety of factors have simultaneously pushed infrastructure toward greater security while undermining it by building technological and legal weaknesses into the security regime so as to enable greater surveillance. The book also makes the case for why security is important and should be protected and strengthened, while acknowledging that properly supervised and audited surveillance is sometimes necessary for the enforcement of law and protection of the nation.

Landau's work is particularly strong in its rich historical narrative that ends at the present day and does a good job of representing the broad range of technologies and issues that are at the core of discourse surrounding government surveillance powers. Examples are drawn from a variety of sources to advance the case that law enforcement conducts surveillance without adhering to the laws regulating such surveillance with disturbing frequency. Moreover, while the amount of information available about individuals is quite large, the use of aggregations of that information to single out individuals who might pose a threat can be unreliable. This work sounds a clear warning about the power available to the state in the aggregation and analysis of data.

While focused on law enforcement, the book also narrates the strong effect that national security imperatives have had on the erosion of privacy in the name of security. Law enforcement's use of many surveillance technologies can be traced to the intelligence community, specifically the National Security Agency. In this context, one area that could have been usefully addressed is the growing role of secrecy in legal interpretation. While it is clear in many chapters that the U.S. government interprets the law to its own advantage, the idea that its interpretations are not necessarily open to public scrutiny is troubling and problematic. Combined with the growth of government secrecy overall, the findings make for unsettling reading.

Surveillance or Security? is a well-written account of the modern history of surveillance in the United States, contextualized in relation to the growing importance of information in our increasingly data-driven world. It also provides the crucial policy and legal contexts in which this history has occurred, many poorly understood or overlooked. In combining history, policy, and law, Landau has written a disturbing account of the events and decisions that have led us to our current predicament, and she offers some good ideas for moving forward. Regretfully, given the trajectory of federal policy on the issues addressed here, Landau's sound advice is likely to fall on deaf ears.