Should you care that the government is stealing telephone and Internet data ? Shane Harris says attitudes to privacy have changed . Massive quantity of data is unlikely to be evidence of terrorist plots , he says . Harris : When I was writing my book , `` The Watchers , '' about the rise of these big surveillance systems , I met analyst after analyst who said that data mining tends to produce big , unwieldy masses of potential bad actors and threats , but rarely does it produce a solid lead on a terrorist plot . We need hard evidence that selling off privacy for security actually works .
Should you care that the government is stealing telephone and Internet data ? Shane Harris says attitudes to privacy have changed . Massive quantity of data is unlikely to be evidence of terrorist plots , he says . Harris : We need hard evidence that selling off privacy for security actually works .