AT THE VERY LEAST, WE WANT IT TO SOLVE ALL OF OUR PROBLEMS

I was at Uptown Pizzeria the other day, when I heard a group of older women next to me talking about the Washington Naval Yard shooting. It had just happened a day or two earlier, and they seemed angrier more than concerned. Rather than being worried that the next mass shooting could be in Hoboken, NJ, they expressed frustration at the inability of “Big Surveillance” to somehow apprehend criminals before they commit crimes. The quote I remember the clearest was:

“…they’ve got all this equipment, they’re spying on us all the time, and they let this guy in?”

It’s possible this was in reference to the fact that the shooter was allowed onto the premises with weapons in his car, without being checked. And it isn’t unreasonable, given his past arrest, that he would be on some kind of minor alert list somewhere. All I know is, after the moon landing, people would encounter ineffective technology and say “they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t do x.” Now, the phrase has become “they do all this data collection, and still they know nothing.”

The part I found most interesting about their conversation, however, was our deeply ingrained desire for these systems to be in place and do what they are supposed to do. We pretend to be angry at the NSA just because “the computer boys” are in a frenzy and we don’t want to incur their wrath, but really we just want to be safe. People love to throw around quotes from the Founding Fathers about the price of giving up liberty, but we all secretly know that sentiment won’t keep us from being the next candle at a moonlight vigil.

With that all said, I have compiled a list of psychological needs we have as a public in order to accept surveillance:

1. We Want to Know About These Things

You can make a map of my travels across the same 5 blocks of Hoboken for years if you want – track my calls, who I send emails to, the whole nine yards. I think people just want to know that these systems are in place so they have the illusion of voting for and accepting it. Because if we don’t know about the system, how can we feel safe knowing that the system is out there protecting us?

2. We Want to Be Able to Ignore These Things

Surveillance needs to be the kind of thing we can ignore even if we know about it. Big cameras and cops on the corner in cars are obvious, and we don’t like knowing we’re being watched. It’s just unsettling, even if the screen image of us walking into CVS will be deleted tomorrow and we’re not doing anything wrong. We need to be able to ignore surveillance, which is why what the NSA does is probably the best route to take – it happens automatically, you don’t notice a difference, and you go on with your life.

3. We Want to Hear Stories About How They Work to Protect Us

Everyone loves a good “this guy almost did this” story. We love to hear about the underwear bombers of the world who tried to do something terrible and got caught. It’s comedy gold, and makes for a relieving tale on the 11:00 news. Sure, it makes us wonder how they got as far as they did, but in the end it is satisfying. I like to think of it as reverse terrorism, allaying your fears instead of adding to them. We need to hear more stories about that stuff going on to remind us that the surveillance programs out there are actually doing something.

4. At The Very Least, It Needs To Solve All Of Our Problems

Finally, in order to make the first three items on the list go according to plan, Big Surveillance needs to protect us from all wars, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, robberies, kidnappings and rapes. If it can’t prevent criminals from doing bad things, we’re going to complain about it. Yes, we all saw Minority Report and thought about how bad it would be if the world was like that. Now if we’re all through kidding ourselves, we can admit openly that we would have loved it if the Naval Yard shooter walked outside of his door on Monday and got arrested for being about to go on a shooting rampage, and no one would have had to die.