{"id":31283,"date":"2013-07-01T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=31283"},"modified":"2015-05-06T09:00:12","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T08:00:12","slug":"the-criminal-n-s-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/07\/the-criminal-n-s-a\/","title":{"rendered":"The Criminal N.S.A."},"content":{"rendered":"

THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans\u2019 phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration\u2019s claims that these \u201cmodest encroachments on privacy\u201d<\/a> were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to \u201cmeh.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t help that Congressional watchdogs \u2014 with a few exceptions, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky \u2014 have accepted the White House\u2019s claims of legality. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg<\/a> and David Ignatius<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This view is wrong \u2014 and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. 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 \u2014 and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.<\/p>\n

The administration has defended each of the two secret programs. Let\u2019s examine them in turn.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ctangible things,\u201d upon showing reasonable grounds that the things sought are \u201crelevant\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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>, a Wisconsin Republican and one of the architects of the Patriot Act, and a man not known as a civil libertarian, has said that \u201cCongress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations.\u201d The N.S.A.\u2019s demand for information about every American\u2019s phone calls isn\u2019t \u201ctargeted\u201d at all \u2014 it\u2019s a dragnet. \u201cHow can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?\u201d Mr. Sensenbrenner has asked. The answer is simple: It\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 any data might be \u201crelevant\u201d to an investigation eventually, if by \u201ceventually\u201d you mean \u201csometime before the end of time.\u201d If all data is \u201crelevant,\u201d it makes a mockery of the already shaky concept of relevance.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s turn to Prism: the streamlined, electronic seizure of communications from Internet companies. In combination with what we have already learned about the N.S.A.\u2019s access to telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, Prism is further proof that the agency is collecting vast amounts of e-mails and other messages \u2014 including communications to, from and between Americans.<\/p>\n

The government justifies Prism under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Section 1881a of the act gave the president broad authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance. If the attorney general and the director of national intelligence certify that the purpose of the monitoring is to collect foreign intelligence information about any non\u00adAmerican individual or entity not known to be in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can require companies to provide access to Americans\u2019 international communications. The court does not approve the target or the facilities to be monitored, nor does it assess whether the government is doing enough to minimize the intrusion, correct for collection mistakes and protect privacy. Once the court issues a surveillance order, the government can issue top-secret directives to Internet companies like Google and Facebook to turn over calls, e-mails, video and voice chats, photos, voice\u00adover IP calls (like Skype) and social networking information.<\/p>\n

Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government \u201cmay not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans\u2019 protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target\u2019s \u201cforeignness\u201d \u2014 as John Oliver of \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d put it, \u201ca coin flip plus 1 percent.\u201d By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.<\/p>\n

How could vacuuming up Americans\u2019 communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word \u201cacquire\u201d only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.<\/p>\n

The administration hides the extent of its \u201cincidental\u201d surveillance of Americans behind fuzzy language. When Congress reauthorized the law at the end of 2012, legislators said Americans had nothing to worry about because the surveillance could not \u201ctarget\u201d American citizens or permanent residents. Mr. Clapper offered the same assurances. Based on these statements, an ordinary citizen might think the N.S.A. cannot read Americans\u2019 e-mails or online chats under the F.A.A. But that is a government \u00adfed misunderstanding.<\/p>\n

A \u201ctarget\u201d under the act is a person or entity the government wants information on \u2014 not the people the government is trying to listen to. It\u2019s actually O.K. under the act to grab Americans\u2019 messages so long as they are communicating with the target, or anyone who is not in the United States.<\/p>\n

Leave aside the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act for a moment, and turn to the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government\u2019s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans\u2019 communications.<\/p>\n

The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.<\/p>\n

This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans\u2019 sensitive nonpublic information like phone metadata and social networking activity.<\/p>\n

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government\u2019s professed concern with protecting Americans\u2019 privacy. It\u2019s time to call the N.S.A.\u2019s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.<\/p>\n

______________________<\/p>\n

Jennifer Stisa Granick<\/i> is the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. <\/i><\/p>\n

Christopher Jon Sprigman<\/i> is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government\u2019s professed concern with protecting Americans\u2019 privacy. It\u2019s time to call the N.S.A.\u2019s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}