I was thinking about the situation with the NSA and a thought occurred to me:*  What if we take the buzzword ‘terrorism’ out of the equation and look at another scourge:  smuggling.

Right now, our country has a huge problem with smuggling of drugs, people, and money.  This problem includes smuggling both across and within our borders.  The horrors of what illegal drugs are doing to our society, especially in poor, urban areas, as well as the atrocities of human trafficking and forced labor of illegal immigrants are on our front pages and news broadcasts regularly, so the government decides to do more about it.

In an effort to find ways to choke out this smuggling, the government decides that it needs to know the following information:

1. Who is crossing our border on a regular basis?**
2. Who owns large capacity vehicles?
3. Who is moving and using large amounts of money, either electronically or cash?

In order to answer question #1, the government starts using license plate and face recognition technology to figure out who is going across the border on a regular basis.  We can make the argument that knowing who comes and goes through our international borders is a good thing, and is indeed one of the duties of the federal government.  However, recognizing that getting across the border is only the first step for these smuggling networks, the federal government takes it further.  They put up equipment where interstate highways cross state borders and record the license plates of every vehicle that goes by in either direction.  This doesn’t directly infringe on our rights to cross state borders, because they’re not stopping us and they’re only recording the identity of the vehicle, not the passengers.

Later on, they realize that a lot of people fly or take trains in this country, so they start recording the names of everyone who checks in at a train station or an airport.  Again, they’re not infringing on your freedom of movement; they just want to be able to backtrack who goes where and with whom in case someone gets investigated.

On question 2, the government starts out with inquiries to state vehicle registration agencies on such things as large vans, pick-ups, and semi-trucks and trailers.  After a while, it occurs to someone that most illicit drugs are quite small and light, as is cash, and that you can carry more than the driver in the average passenger vehicle.  Realizing that they might be missing a vast amount of smuggling via automobile, they enlarge this information gathering to include not only registrations, but also purchases and rentals of all vehicles, from motorcycles to minivans to semi’s.  Again, they’re not stopping anyone from buying and driving whatever they want; they’re just gathering data.

For question #3, they start with the current regime of banks reporting any transaction over $10,000.  It occurs to someone in the government that criminals know about this reporting, and are making multiple smaller transactions to avoid it, or are not using banks at all.  In an effort to broaden the amount of financial data they have for smuggling investigations, they require banks to report on all financial transactions, no matter the size.  Since a vast majority of businesses use computers to track transactions, the government sends letters with the force of law to the vendors of accounting software which require them to put in a reporting function, which tells the government about what products are being purchased, where, by whom, and whether or not they are being done using cash or some manner of electronic payment.  This extends not only to brick and mortar businesses, but also on-line businesses such as Amazon and Apple.

So now, in order to clamp down on smuggling, the government has begun tracking which vehicles are crossing state lines, who owns or uses which vehicles, and who is making purchases and how they are paying for them.  They take all this information and toss it into huge databases.  When they find that someone is suspected of being a smuggler, they mine that data to track his or her activities, and put in ‘strict’ controls to make sure no-one ever uses the data for nefarious reasons.

One wrinkle on this:  Let’s say that neither Customs, nor the Secret Service, nor even the FBI is doing this.  In order to leverage the capabilities of the NSA and save some money, the government gives the job to them.  The NSA gathers the data, keeps it, and retrieves it at the request of law enforcement.  So now we have an agency, which was set up and fenced off to gather intelligence about our foreign adversaries, being used to gather data and provide intelligence about our citizens.

Sound ridiculous?  I don’t think so.  Yes, there are millions of automobiles in this country, and a lot of them cross state lines every day.  And there are billions of financial transactions every day, from purchasing a soda at the stop-n-stap, to buying stock, to purchasing a home.  It would take a huge amount of storage and computing power to track all of that.  But you know, they could if they wanted to.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my little stroll down the path of conspiracy theories, or maybe you can call this speculative fiction.  But to be honest, it’s only a few degrees away from what recent revelations have indicated when it comes to the activities of our government and our security organs.  There are a massive number of telephone calls every day, and that number is probably dwarfed by the number of Internet transactions such as search, email, and just plain old web surfing going on.

We need to get a handle on this, and repaint the very bright and wide lines we do not wish our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to cross, no matter the motivation.  Yes, we need to monitor for heinous crimes such as terrorism and human trafficking, but the damage that overreaching domestic intelligence programs will, not may, cause to our society is worse than just about anything a terrorist can pull off.

Is the illusion of safety worth not only the erosion, but rather the full-scale spindling, folding, and mutilation of our freedoms?

*I know, mark your calendars.

**Let’s assume that people, goods, and cash only come across at official ports of entry for the sake of this discussion.