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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Criminal N.S.A. (Good Take Down of the Illegality of the NSA Programs)
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The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.
The administration has defended each of the two secret programs. Lets examine them in turn.
Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contract employee and whistle-blower, has provided evidence that the government has phone record metadata on all Verizon customers, and probably on every American, going back seven years. This metadata is extremely revealing; investigators mining it might be able to infer whether we have an illness or an addiction, what our religious affiliations and political activities are, and so on.
The law under which the government collected this data, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, allows the F.B.I. to obtain court orders demanding that a person or company produce tangible things, upon showing reasonable grounds that the things sought are relevant to an authorized foreign intelligence investigation. The F.B.I. does not need to demonstrate probable cause that a crime has been committed, or any connection to terrorism.
Even in the fearful time when the Patriot Act was enacted, in October 2001, lawmakers never contemplated that Section 215 would be used for phone metadata, or for mass surveillance of any sort. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and one of the architects of the Patriot Act, and a man not known as a civil libertarian, has said that Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations. The N.S.A.s demand for information about every Americans phone calls isnt targeted at all its a dragnet. How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation? Mr. Sensenbrenner has asked. The answer is simple: Its not.
The government claims that under Section 215 it may seize all of our phone call information now because it might conceivably be relevant to an investigation at some later date, even if there is no particular reason to believe that any but a tiny fraction of the data collected might possibly be suspicious. That is a shockingly flimsy argument any data might be relevant to an investigation eventually, if by eventually you mean sometime before the end of time. If all data is relevant, it makes a mockery of the already shaky concept of relevance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html?pagewanted=1
Kolesar
(31,182 posts)It includes shallow material from the likes of Sensenbrenner and a joke from the Daily Show as "filler".
morningfog
(18,115 posts)on the filler in an attempt to distract and divert.
Kolesar
(31,182 posts)morningfog
(18,115 posts)Childish and more diversions.
Pholus
(4,062 posts)the loaded adjectives "superficial" and "shallow" it becomes completely semantically null.
"A redress of what's been on DU for days" -- on a discussion board? say it ain't so!
"It includes material from the likes of Sesenbrenner and a joke from the Daily Show as "filler." -- yeah, so?