Nudging secrecy
by digby
I have to say that I’m just a teensy bit skeptical that the guy who obstructed massive amounts of regulation during the Obama administration’s first term is a guy we can trust to make adequate recommendations to “reform” the NSA policies. But I guess he’s what we’ve got. This interview with Cass Sunstein in the New Republic spells out his thinking on the matter and it’s quite interesting. This speaks to one of my big concerns about the data collection:
JR: You say that if the government happens to collect the data of Americans when they’re communicating with non-Americans, it shouldn’t be allowed to use that data in any legal proceedings against the Americans. What was the thinking behind that recommendation?
CS: If an American is communicating with someone outside the country, which is hardly unusual, and if the government lawfully but inadvertently picks up the material and finds out something about the American, we recommend that it can’t use that as evidence against the American if there’s no national security rationale. The idea is that section 702, [the part of the foreign intelligence law that justifies the surveillance of non-Americans], was about national security and if Americans are incidentally swept up because they’re talking to other people, that’s not legitimately used as evidence against Americans. It wasn’t intended as a program for surveillance of Americans.
I wouldn’t have thought you’d have to be explicit about that but apparently you do.
After having read about the results of the Church Commission and the way the government set about immediately undermining the intentions of the reforms that came out of it, I don’t have a whole lot of faith that these “reforms” will fix the problem. As long as we are a powerful global military empire that organizes a large portion of its government and society around policing and national security, civil liberties will be challenged. But it’s important to at least slow it down when we get the chance and allow people the ability to think a little bit about what all this means. And I think that’s going to happen as a result of the Snowden revelations. That’s a good thing.
