Surveillance, Privacy, and Openness.

The story which The Guardian broke late yesterday reveals that the NSA has been collecting metadata in

bulk - that is, about the general public - from Verizon's records. It's hard to know what sort of commentary would suffice in the face of a revelation like this; the scale is breathtaking.

A question occurs to me, though, that takes me in a different direction than the standard conversations that typically arise in the wake of such revelations. What, precisely, is it that's wrong with the NSA surveillance? Is it the fact that they're collecting information which should be private - or is it actually a different issue altogether?

I ask such a question because I'm trying, basically, to figure out whether two beliefs I hold are consistent:

1. I have a legal (and moral) right to keep information about myself private (i.e., to control the privacy/publicity of my own information).
2. There are good practical (and moral) reasons to prefer that information, in general, be public and openly accessible.

What's objectionable about the NSA's behavior in this case? What if it's not the bare fact that they have my (and your) telephony metadata, but rather, the fact that they have ours but we don't have theirs? Perhaps, at base, the problem here is the imbalance of access to information, rather than the access itself.

Given that we're not likely to gain a comparable degree of access to the NSA's telephony metadata, it's not prudent to expect a Shangri-La of free and open information access anytime soon. And so in practice, the likeliest path to redressing that imbalance (since raising the level of citizens' access to information is unlikely) is to lower the level of government access to information. This amounts to the same things we're used to hearing - that we must be vigilant about restricting the degree of government access to our information.

However, I think it's critical to make a distinction in the conceptual justification for this action, else we end up fetishizing information privacy for its own sake - and in so doing, misidentifying the locus of the ethical problem. And when we start trying to think about issues of information privacy/openness in other contexts, we risk starting from a false premise, and as a consequence not being able to identify consistent grounds to support our intended results.