On the Record: Benkler on NSA, the Manning Trial, and the Future
of Journalism  From the Print Edition / Interview   /   October
21, 2013  /   Photo by Jonathan Nomamiukor  ON THE RECORD: Can
you discuss the Constitutional ramifications of programs like
the NSA and the NDAA act?  YOCHAI BENKLER: The thing to
understand about the NSA surveillance program is that it
represents a fundamental inversion of the model at the heart of
the fourth amendment: the idea of privacy as a check on
government power. We use the term privacy and sometimes we mean
vis a vis commercial firms and sometimes we mean vis a vis the
state. In either case, they are ways of checking power — either
the power of commercial power or the commercial state. In the
fourth amendment, the core idea is that the state shouldn’t know
too much about us. Large amounts of social behavior and activity
need to be outside the gaze of the state. What does that mean?
It means that essentially we believe that the state needs to be
blind to much of what goes