Can We Trust the Government With Our Data?

With the New York Times's new assertion that the U.S. government has been tracking financial information from international banks, American citizens are once again left wondering if our government knows best how to handle our most personal data.

Like the stories that broke a few months ago regarding international and possibly domestic NSA phone tapping and call record data mining, this revelation is probably not shocking to us closet conspiracy theorists. If you're like me and inherently suspicious of the NSA's activities, you probably already refrain from saying things on the phone that might trigger an alert from whoever is listening in.

Now, I can't deny that one of the government's main responsibilities is to protect its citizens from criminals, whether they come in the form of al Queda or identity thieves. But when taken with the Patriot Act's flagrant lack of oversight, these programs require us to completely trust those that monitor our activities, whether physical, digital or otherwise.

Personally, I don't think that the Bush administration has earned that kind of trust. Between the bad intelligence on Iraq's WMD capabilities and the unbelievably incompetent response to Katrina, I don't think I'd trust them to watch a pet fish while I was gone for a long weekend. But beyond that, we've seen story after story in recent months that detail how they've failed to safeguard the basic data they already have about us. From social security numbers to medical records, our information is apparently being taken home from government offices on laptops and left in personal cars for the common auto thief to steal way more often than we all probably throught (and would prefer).

It all comes down to the simple notion of credibility. If the Bush administration is going to ask us to trust them with not only our personal data, but our lives, they need to start earning that trust. Bush and Tony Snow's responses to the most recent NY Times story implied that people's lives were at risk now that terrorists know we're tracking their finances. First, do Bush & Co. really expect us to believe that the people who carried out 9/11, an attack that was obviously well researched and meticulously planned, are too clueless to realize that major banking institutions might be looking at transactions and notifying government agencies of suspicious activities? Second, in the real world (not the Little Red Riding Hood realm of good vs. evil that's often used as a scare tactic), what's the more likely scenario -- another 9/11 attack or a person's identity being stolen from an unsecured government laptop? Bin Laden was living in a cave the last time I checked.

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