Expert: NSA phone-tracking 'insane'

[damnedifIknow]

A longtime expert on the National Security Agency calls its practice of vacuuming up millions of American phone records nothing short of “insane.”

James Bamford, who has written four books on the NSA and writes often about its practices since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, told POLITICO in an exclusive interview on Thursday the agency’s phone-tracking system was the latest case in which he said it overstepped the law under the pretext of defending the U.S. from its enemies."

“If you want do that, do it the legal way,” he said. “There are 300 million people in the U.S. — what is [the tracking] supposed to do? It’s just insane. A sane person would not request access to everybody’s communications in the United States.”

A senior government official defended the NSA’s practices on Thursday, arguing that its data collection “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

"House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) went even further on Thursday, declaring to reporters that the NSA’s phone-tracking “was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States.”

“We know that,” he said. “It’s important. It fills in a little seam that we have. And it’s used to make sure that there’s not an international nexus to any terrorism event that they may believe is ongoing in the United States.”

Bamford, however, said Wednesday’s Guardian report described “an expansion of power that’s never happened before – the use of NSA for domestic surveillance on virtually all of the Americans in the U.S.” He compared it to the practices of the government of East Germany, where, as Bamford put it, “everybody’s a suspect until you prove you’re not a suspect.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/james-bamford-nsa-phone-tracking-92379.html

[JaneyVee]

1. It's not really everyone in the United States, millions of poor people have no cellphone or internet

[MNBrewer]

2. Well THAT makes it all better!

[DisgustipatedinCA]

4. Hey, maybe we can put RFiD chips in the poor (we'll charge them, of course). n/t

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. they have landlines, tho , many of them.

and use mail.
The extent of how much communication is being tracked is still being discovered.
You can bet that whatever Verizon was told to produce, so were the other telcoms.

[arikara]

5. I was told 3 decades ago

by a friend who worked for the telephone company to never say anything over the phone that you didn't want overheard. Its always gone on unfortunately.