How All Three Branches Conspired to Threaten Your Privacy

[marmar]

from the American Prospect:


How All Three Branches Conspired to Threaten Your Privacy

Scott Lemieux
June 7, 2013

Checks and balances have not worked in the way the framers envisioned.


The recent revelations about the court order issued to Verizon asking them to hand over data about the calls made by millions of customers were chilling not so much for the specific information the government was asking for, but for what the order likely portended. Given its massive scope, the potential for spying into electronic communications made much more disturbing revelations inevitable. It didn't take long for the other shoe to drop.

In a blockbuster story, Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of The Washington Post have revealed the existence of a more comprehensive spying program with the code name PRISM involving the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as at least nine telecommunications giants. It's a classic case of how checks and balances have not worked in the way the framers envisioned. Far from checking executive overreach, Congress has authorized dangerous expansions of power while various levels of the judiciary break out their rubber stamps.

While I disagree with much of what Slate's William Saletan has to say in defense of the Verizon letter uncovered on Wednesday, he does raise one powerful argument. The order did not seek the content of emails, making the spying less intrusive than wiretapping. "The targeted data are mathematical," he wrote, "not verbal." I can understand the argument that—to return to the classic Fourth Amendment analogies I mentioned yesterday—the Verizon order seized data more comparable to the front of an envelope or garbage left on the sidewalk than a private telephone call.

Whatever its merits, this defense of the NSA (and FBI) is no longer operative. The PRISM program does not merely assess the number and length of phone calls or emails. As explained in the remarkable slideshow leaked to the Post, the NSA data-mining includes a wide variety of content hosted on corporate servers: emails, online chats, phone calls, data stored on cloud drives, video conferences, and a variety of other data. (including, in case that list is not quite comprehensive enough, "special requests.&quot PRISM has access to both stored and live data. This isn't like looking at the front of envelopes; this is like ripping open the letters, scanning the contents, and storing the information. "The PRISM program appears more nearly to resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders issued by President George W. Bush," the Post article asserts, and "shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques." ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://prospect.org/article/how-all-three-branches-conspired-threaten-your-privacy

[Octafish]

1. 5-4 was a clue.

October Surprise, Iran-Contra, Lying America into Iraq Twice, Wall-to-Wall Spying, forgiven also are important realities to remember.