A Modest Proposal for NSA Data Collection

I have a suggestion for solving nearly all of NSA’s problems: A click-through agreement. A peculiarity of the NSA data collection controversy is that the US public, we are told, is outraged by NSA activities, including the collection of "metadata," on the one hand, while that same public appears quite willing to share much of its private life through social media with the world at large, on the other. When this seeming inconsistency gets pointed out, one response is that individuals freely choose to make their private selves available to social media services and they consent to the dissemination of their personal information and its use by social media companies---and lots of other companies that make apps and services available---in exchange for obtaining stuff for free. They give up a lot of information about themselves to these companies, which then exploit it for their own ends. The mechanism for their supposed “consent” is a legally-binding click-through agreement that nobody reads but that courts enforce as a contract. It's a strange notion of consent. And I would argue that NSA data collection does have a far more meaningful form of consent---not the consent of the marketplace consumer who agrees to share his or her personal information with a tech company, but instead the consent implied by a democratic political system. But never mind that. These click-through agreements have real legal power. And two can play at that game. The government, after all, provides a lot of services. Want to visit that national park? Sure, just click through on the Interior Department’s Terms of Service, which might include your giving consent to having your metadata collected and used for counterterrorism purposes. Want to get on an airplane and thereby avail yourself of federal air traffic control? When you buy your ticket, you can click your consent to having your communications monitored to the extent their contents can be legally acquired under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or Title III. Want to use the Internet? From now on, anyone in the US accessing the internet, using email, or doing any type of communications involving the radio spectrum, which is owned by the government and licensed to private users after all, can click through their agreement to, oh, say, the entire US Code, beginning to end---including all that stuff about NSA. For that matter, why not include a waiver of all government liability at the end, of course---just like the companies do? Why shouldn't government have the same ability to license access to its services on its own terms. It's good enough for software vendors. No one is forcing the citizen-consumer to consent, after all. You’re free to live in a cave if you prefer. (And just for the record, yes, this is a joke.)