This whole omniscience thing is great!
Undenied, the Obama Administration under a top-secret court order they solicited as part of a provision of the 2001 Patriot Act, collected the telephone records of tens of millions of American customers of Verizon. The response from the Obama Administration is to maintain that the records involve a “meta analysis” of traffic and not individual conversations.
My response is “so what”
I find the Patriot Act to the extent it exceeds previously established anti-ease-dropping protections, when it applies to offshore calls (and assuming common awareness) troubling but less troubling when it involves non-citizens. Now that the power is in the hands of people under Obama’s oversight, it is of much greater concern. That is not inconsistent, that is practical . . . some people’s discretion you can trust, or even must trust in an emergency, others – not so.
However collecting citizens’ phone records in general, which is what this is about, with out a specific court order relating to those under reasonable suspicion of covered crimes, is a different matter.
Indeed as reported in Madison.com, the lead author of the Patriot Act, Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R – Wisconsin) stated today in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.” Furthermore according to the report:
Sensenbrenner maintains that the authors of the Patriot Act “found an appropriate balance” between national security and constitutional rights. But he “has always worried about potential abuses of the Act.” He concluded by issuing a warning that the section used to obtain the phone records could be struck when the provisions are due to expire in 2015.
My thoughts and questions regarding the excuse made by some, essentially that “its only a meta analysis” —
- We are not talking about road use surveys and traffic counts here . . . I am lead to believe these are assignable data matters, don’t citizens have a right not to have their traceable movements even contribute to government data base?
- Do we have a collective right to collective privacy safe from government intrusion?
- I am a former Verizon customer. The idea that it is Verizon’s data — is insufficient justification – is it not properly both of ours? I am a party to the creation of the data — should not the collection and use in a commercial transaction not require both of our permissions? * When it comes to government intrusion even on a “meta” basis where the technology is so easily toggled to be directed at any individual there should be protections closer akin to wiretap situation jurisprudence, the FISA court is insufficient in that regard.
- Whether or not specific phone conversation are listened to or recorded, what kind of government protective of civil liberties tracks its citizens movements for merely potentially prosecutorial purposes? The gotcha mind-set?
- And as to the alleged successful use of the information to prevent an attack, the question is, was there another way to protect us from a terrorist attack with a more appropriate narrow court order, where sifting data does not involve treating innocent citizens as chaff or clutter but still subject to the big eyeball ?
- Regarding “Bush did it” — according to the The Guardian, the British newspaper that originally broke the story: “Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.”
And by the way, for my money, we ought to consider the establishment of moral protections in contract law to prevent Verizon et al from making use of such overbearing, essentially involuntary data mining other than for the evaluation of equipment needs . . . not for surreptitious expandable profiling. The potential abuses from “big corporate” can be as offensive as big government. R Mall
* No doubt this was the reason for legislation within the last few years “immunizing” the telephony companies from lawsuits regarding turning over data to the government.
