It is alarming to think that the government can dig into everyone’s lives and dig up information regardless of their right to privacy, which is a good political tool to use to spread fear among voters. When Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Friday about President Joe Biden using a leak to start spying on the American people, he conveniently forgot that permission had already been granted by the Patriot Act that was passed back in 2001under a Republican president, and that nearly everyone agreed to it in record time.
Trump Jr.’s tweet comes after a headline broke on Wednesday that U.S. intel agencies were looking to change how they monitor social media and chatrooms after it was discovered that classified documents had been circulating the internet for at least a month. According to NBC, “The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.” It went on to say that gaming sites aren’t normally monitored by intel agencies and that it was understandable that they wouldn’t have detected the leak.
Of course, it needs to be pointed out that these are public places and can be legally monitored by anyone at this time. Anywhere anyone can join and sit in on the online conversation, which is open to government monitoring without any special law or act to provide it the power to do so. When Zuckerberg went before Congress in 2018 to testify about data protection, this was the issue at hand. Whatever users share about themselves online becomes public information, and that includes biographical information as well as photos, videos, documents, and all other types of digital content.
Moreover, the government does have permission to dig into more private devices available to online users, and that’s something Trump Jr. seems to have forgotten.
Ironically, while Trump Jr. is talking about monitoring social media and is raising concerns about searches into digital messages and text messages, the USA PATRIOT Act was passed immediately after September 11, 2001, and almost unanimously in a completely bipartisan decision. As per the Department of Justice, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, the Senate passed it with a 98-1 vote, while the House passed it with a 357-66 vote.
According to the ACLU, “At a time when computerization is leading to the creation of more and more such records, Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI to force anyone at all – including doctors, libraries, bookstores, universities, and Internet service providers – to turn over records on their clients or customers.”
Before the Patriot Act, the FBI only had the power to perform such surveillance activities on foreign agents or powers, and could only access records. After the Patriot Act, the power was expanded to include anyone, and access was granted to anything tangible, which includes data that could be provided by Internet service providers who are carriers and deliverers of digital messages, while phone companies do the same for text messages.
Donald Trump Jr. is a little late on his concerns about everyone’s privacy. The fact that it was a government leak that the government now needs to expand monitoring highlights the irony of it all.