Expert: NSA phone-tracking 'insane'
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.”
NSA’s stock in trade has always been to try to accumulate ever-more data, Bamford said, up to the point that, as revealed by Wednesday’ report in the Britain’s Guardian newspaper, it tracks information about nearly every phone call made within the U.S. or from the U.S. to another country. Included are phone numbers, durations and locations of calls and other “metadata,” though not the content of the calls themselves.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/james-bamford-nsa-phone-tracking-92379.html