Because you now have the existence of this massive flow of information that didn’t exist before. The TSA guard is not taking photos of me every time I fly. I don’t have to worry about what happens with those photos if they don’t exist. But if they do exist, then I am now at risk of all sorts of bad things happening, like the aforementioned calibration of mass surveillance, or some other angle.
If the government says “we’re not using this checkpoint stuff to spy on you or anything nefarious like that, and we’re definitely not putting together a massive database of the IDs and photos of people going through our checkpoints” I have to take them at their word because national security gets broad carve outs from transparency tools like FOIA.
Their word is historically not worth much. Government leaks data all the time. It is actually still not that great at security controls in a practical sense, at least insofar as deterring major breaches of privacy is concerned. That’s why LOVEINT happens. That’s why TSA went and posted a picture of the master key that unlocks all those stupid approved locks on the Internet. That’s why stuff like the OPM breach happen. All of this is stuff that isn’t SUPPOSED to happen, but does, regularly, because in reality government (like everyone else) has little ability to control what will happen to information once it ingests it.
And that’s just the dangerous stuff that happens without any intent on the government’s part. Whether they’re misleading Congress about the scope of warrantless wiretapping, wildly understating the implications of metadata analysis, or sabotaging cryptography by purposefully advancing backdoored algorithms, or just plain wiretapping political activists without cause to wage campaigns of legal harassment, the various agencies of the USG have a time-honored history of outright lies where privacy is concerned. So no, unfortunately, even if there exist “institutional controls” that could solve these issues in theory, we can safely say they definitely have not been implemented.
These issues are extremely relevant to your right to privacy, because rights are a balance of interests. If the government gets this big new way to abuse people, then they need big new protections against that, or they are going to get abused. Our concept of privacy has to be bigger now than it was when automated surveillance wasn’t a thing, because the stakes went up. By a lot.
If the government says “we’re not using this checkpoint stuff to spy on you or anything nefarious like that, and we’re definitely not putting together a massive database of the IDs and photos of people going through our checkpoints” I have to take them at their word because national security gets broad carve outs from transparency tools like FOIA.
Their word is historically not worth much. Government leaks data all the time. It is actually still not that great at security controls in a practical sense, at least insofar as deterring major breaches of privacy is concerned. That’s why LOVEINT happens. That’s why TSA went and posted a picture of the master key that unlocks all those stupid approved locks on the Internet. That’s why stuff like the OPM breach happen. All of this is stuff that isn’t SUPPOSED to happen, but does, regularly, because in reality government (like everyone else) has little ability to control what will happen to information once it ingests it.
And that’s just the dangerous stuff that happens without any intent on the government’s part. Whether they’re misleading Congress about the scope of warrantless wiretapping, wildly understating the implications of metadata analysis, or sabotaging cryptography by purposefully advancing backdoored algorithms, or just plain wiretapping political activists without cause to wage campaigns of legal harassment, the various agencies of the USG have a time-honored history of outright lies where privacy is concerned. So no, unfortunately, even if there exist “institutional controls” that could solve these issues in theory, we can safely say they definitely have not been implemented.
These issues are extremely relevant to your right to privacy, because rights are a balance of interests. If the government gets this big new way to abuse people, then they need big new protections against that, or they are going to get abused. Our concept of privacy has to be bigger now than it was when automated surveillance wasn’t a thing, because the stakes went up. By a lot.