Secrets: Part 2 of 3 - Citizen's Secrets

Who are you?

The rock band The Who asked this question quite famously, and for most of our lives, we will be asking ourselves that very same question, but in a very static and literal sense, this question can be answered

The Supreme Court recently ruled in a 5-4 decision that people who are arrested, not convicted, but simply arrested as suspects in certain crimes, can be forced to place a cotton swab in their mouths and to give up a DNA sample that could be stored in a national government database.

Now, when you think about the secrets you hold as a person, as a citizen, your DNA may not be at the top of your mind, but it is actually the ultimate secret. It is your very biological essence. What diseases you might be prone to, where you come from -- quite simply, who you are.

The court decided that that information can be taken without your consent and kept in a database. Of course, Justice Anthony Kennedy who wrote the 5-4 majority opinion a point of noting that all of the precautions taken with the database in this case, the state is not allowed to just play around with it and search it for fun or interesting facts about people. It can only be used to identify suspects.

Fingerprinting? That is a form of identification, I can't tell your real hair color, if you were adopted, or your proneness to athletes foot. As science progresses, the answers to these and so many questions can be gleamed from DNA, and our ability to store and categorize this information is expanding at a logarithmic pace.

Now, even as a write this, news is breaking of a massive accumulation of phone records and other internet data that the government simply asked for. Tens of millions of data points now stamped with 'top secret' and added to the stack of intelligence guarded by the government.The strongest protection is a promise of those in power not to abuse this power. A promise that the admission to their gathering off all this metadata, seems to have been broken.

But no matter how responsible the state promises to be with it, it is a government database that is subject to the statement forces that our top secret clearance system is. And that system that America, as I've already discussed, is trying and failing to keep everyone, from Chinese hackers to 19 year old Army Privates, out of these days, which is to say that we have system that cannot keep its secrets.

No more secrets. Who you are, down to the very molecular fiber of your being, and what you do, from emails to call logs to what dirty websites you visit late at night, could find itself on a spreadsheet that 10 years or 20 years from now, that is printed out and carried out of an office just about anywhere in the world. The question this begs is do we believe in a government structure that holds these secrets. Do we accept that to live in a free and safe society, these secrets need to be held? That we will still recognize our country in the rubble as the scaffolding that held these secrets, lays in ruin.

Click here to read part 1

Part one dealt about the size and scope of the structure, part two about the type and volume of data they attempt to hold up, Part three will looks into the chinks that may ultimately bring it down.