Maybe this will make some people care
by digby
Jane Mayer is out with an interesting piece about metadata. There doesn’t seem to be much concern about it being used against average citizens, usually Muslims, but perhaps the possibility of it being used for some other purposes will start to worry people.
For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.
Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones at night.
Yes, I know they are professionals and the president says I should trust them, but still …
William Binney, a former N.S.A. official who spoke to me for the Drake story, retired rather than keep working for an agency he suspected had begun to violate Americans’ fundamental privacy rights. After 9/11, Binney told me, as I reported in the piece, General Michael Hayden, who was then director of the N.S.A., “reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Binney, who considered himself a conservative, feared that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program was so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.”
As he told me at the time, wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, but data mining is an automated process, which means that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, the government could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he said. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”
The unctuous Ari Fleischer was just on Anderson Cooper telling us that we should all be willing to give up our civil liberties in order to protect ourselves from a handful of potential terrorists. (Well, all liberties except for our god-given constitutional right to shoot first and ask questions later — he couldn’t comment on that one.) He used the example of the TSA, as if taking off your shoes is the same thing as having a bunch of bureaucrats collecting data on every bit of communication in the country. (They are allegedly under obligation to “minimize” any intrusions that aren’t terrorist related, but the government can’t be bothered to tell us what those measures might be or who is responsible for enforcing the rules.)
Ari’s absolutely right that the government’s job would be much easier if we didn’t bother with such niceties as the 4th Amendment. They would undoubtedly have great success at catching criminals if they could ignore all that bill of rights nonsense and were able to burst into every house in town and search it whenever they wanted to. But our country has traditionally held to the principle that even though it may complicate its job, the government can’t do this sort of thing unless there is probable cause to believe that an individual is a suspect. This came about from a healthy mistrust of the people in charge and centuries of experience with autocratic power.
I guess your mileage may vary on all this but it seems to me that we should at least think a little bit about it before we shrug this whole thing off.
Anyway … here’s a little reminder of why one wouldn’t want to work for the NSA:
Pretty much …
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