PRESIDENT
DEFENDS NSA PROGRAM
BIPARTISAN
OUTRAGE AND SUPPORT
The National
Security Agency campus in Ft. Meade, Maryland
TAGS:
NSA METADATA COLLECTION, VERIZON TURNING OVER DATA DAILY, RIGHT TO PRIVACY
THE
‘PRISM’ PROGRAM, THE 4th AMENDMENT, FISA COURT, PRESIDENTIAL
DIRECTIVE
STATUTORY
AUTHORITY, CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT, DUE PROCESS UNDER LAW
(Thursday June 6, 2013 Ft.
Meade, Maryland) The tinted reflective
glass that clads the building of the National Security Agency (NSA) building
are the most visible occluding layer of a larger set of protections that keep
the ultra-secret work of this agency from the public. By its defining mission when it was first
established and by numerous presidential directives and legislative maneuvers,
it has long been the “house of secrets”.
What has been known is that the NSA owns and operates the most advanced computer
hardware and software in the world and its capabilities have long been rumored
to be “God-like”. As of yesterday a
layer of that highly guarded secrecy was rudely slipped off when a report in
The Guardian newspaper revealed that the NSA has been collecting “metadata”
from one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, Verizon. The reaction is Washington DC has been oddly
mixed with some Democrats supporting the data sharing efforts while many
usually hawkish Republicans see it as a tremendous infringement on the most
basic of our Constitutional rights.
As has by now been widely
reported by media outlets nationwide, this program has been up and running
since 2006 and was approved by Congressional National Security Committee’s and
strongly advocated by the Cheney/Bush administration. This revelation comes at a time when
Americans seem to have grown weary of the “war on terror” and President Obama
has recently announced his alterations to and recalibrating of this country’s
efforts to defend itself against terrorism.
To many citizens the uncovering of this program is proof positive that
in the name of the war on terror many of our most basic and valued rights to
privacy have been obliterated. Today, 12
years after the broad sweeping bundle of legislation collectively known as The
Patriot Act was quickly enacted in the wake of the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, profound questions remain unanswered regarding the balance
between National Security, anti-terrorism and intelligence gathering
initiatives and our rights as America citizens to be free from what appear to
be Orwellian tactics restricting our rights to privacy, freedom of expression,
and due process under the law.
INTERMEDIATE ACTS, PERPETUAL ACCESS
Almost all Americans alive
today can recall vividly the images of September 11, 2001 and how they
felt. In those shaky days immediately
following and the subsequent weeks thereafter, most Americans seemed to share the
common thought that our government must do whatever it takes to avoid another
terrorist attack on our soil. We wanted
revenge, expressed a virulent strain of retribution and supported whatever the
Cheney/Bush administration told us they needed to do to protect us. A catastrophic event of the magnitude of
9-11-01 was for brief moment in our
history provided a galvanizing, uniting
degree of support for whatever means needed to be employed to protect us and
kill or capture those who perpetrated the unprecedented attack on our
soil. Little did we realize that such
blanket acceptance of the government’s actions was the first in a longer series
of deals with the devil we would sign.
Many of the sanctions imposed in various sectors of our lives, announced
as temporary have now become permanent if not perpetual. As former NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake told
Salon Magazine today, ‘…total, blanket surveillance is “a cancer on the body
politic” that will be very hard to remove indeed.’
Gus Hunt, the Chief Technical
Officer for the CIA told a New York audience in a speech earlier this years
that, “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect
it with something else that arrives at a future point in time … Since you can’t
connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try
to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” In essence Hunt admitted that the data
collection program which is no doubt not limited to Verizon’s cooperation with
the NSA, has been going on for a long time and will likely not, if ever
end. Indeed George Orwell has proven to
be eerily prophetic. But, the question
obvious dangles just above the details of the debate, is such metadata
collection necessary for our national security?
One might be surprised by the wide range of answers to this questions
and where they are coming from.
“CRITICAL TOOL” OR “OUTRAGEOUS BREECH”?
Supporters of the program such
as Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein of California, who claims she has been
aware of the programs existence since 2006, has called it a “critical tool” is
our efforts to secure the country from terrorism. She has some bipartisan colleagues sharing
her view. Republican opponents in both
the House and Senate have been highly critical of the program as has the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) an atypical ally of Republicans. There is sufficient controversy to go around
with members from both sides of the political divide finding validation of some
of their own core beliefs. Fundamentally,
no matter how one perceives it, this program and some of the other covert
intelligence gathering methods in use today do present as unambiguous assaults
on the 4th Amendment.
Not too long ago it was
necessary for a government law enforcement of intelligence agency to make a
request from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court to conduct
narrowly defined data accumulation from a specific source or sources. Legal experts and scholars well versed in
Constitutional and FISA law have been hard pressed to say that the program does
not infringe on our right to privacy or the 14th Amendments
assurance of due process. Oregon
Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley stated in a news release earlier today, “This
bulk data collection is being done under interpretations of the law that have
been kept secret from the public. Significant FISA [Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act] court opinions that determine the scope of our laws should be
declassified.” What is obvious by now is
that this will now become a major issue in political discourse and will not
quickly drift away as so many crises, real, imagined and implied, tend to in
Washington DC.
METADATA 101
Just to be clear about exactly
what Verizon and other telecoms have been turning over to the NSA, we must look
at what metadata is. Metadata, simply put,
is the same information that appears itemized on our phone bills. It lists numbers called, duration of call and
not much more than that. The federal
government is still required to make an appeal to the FISA Court if they intend
to wiretap – secretly monitor and record – individual’s phone calls. As the system the NSA is using now, there is
no way to record the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of phone calls
originating in and received in the United States.
PRISM: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
A leaked NSA
training Power Point slide illustrating the basic template of PRISM
In a late breaking development
tonight, The Guardian and Washington Post are reporting that the metadata
operation is just one among many. In an
operation code named “PRISM”, the NSA has secured the cooperation of the seven
largest Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to tap directly into their main “central”
servers. This is an ominously graver
concern than the metadata sharing. By
tapping into the servers of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Apple, and Skype,
the NSA has virtually unlimited access to every computer in the Country, if not
the world. The data collected in this
fashion consists of everything from search histories, key words, downloads,
uploads, e-mails; literally every key stroke of ever user is readily accessible
to the federal government via the PRISM operation. This is of far greater concern for all
Americans in that it is essentially a massive cyber-vacuuming effort that
arbitrarily collects data about innocent Americans and stores it for later
use. The incomprehensibly huge database
the NSA and FBI are amassing represent the single largest collection of digital
data ever performed, perhaps even, ever imagined by the average citizen. The
Top Secret deals these ISP’s struck with the federal intelligence gathering and
law enforcement agencies are so broad and beyond the pale of “reasonability”
that there are sure to be some very contentious legal actions taken by
citizens, privacy advocacy groups and perhaps even massive class actions. Even the most ardent supporters of PRISM in
the abstract seem outraged by it in reality.
What are Americans to think as these revelations of their government’s
massive data collection operations have literally culled information, personal
information, about everyone who uses a personal computer, to say nothing of the
large-scale business, financial and private networks? AS one former NSA official put it, “We are
all ‘persons of interest’ now.”
WHAT ABOUT ME?
William Binney worked for the
NSA for 40 years but resigned after 9-11-01 over his disagreement with what he
saw to be profound, dangerous incursions into the personal lives of innocent
Americans. Speaking on the Democracy Now
radio program today he said, "NSA has been doing all this stuff all along,
and it's been all these companies, not just one". He continued, "They're just continuing
the collection of this data on all U.S. citizens."
For all law abiding citizens
who have lived their lives believing our Constitution really meant something
and afforded protection from such clandestine invasive, intrusive forays into
their personal lives, this is a watershed moment. We all have been violated, seriously violated
and, as the saying goes, once the cat is out of the bag it is not easily put
back in.
For all the other attacks on
our personal right and privileges that have become known in the last dozen
years or so, this is the one that might actually serve as “the tipping point”;
this is the one that may initiate some very powerful public protest and
resistance. This is the one that impacts
us all on a level that none of the other recent “scandals” have or could.
In a way we have been duped,
we have been grossly mislead and lied to.
We have become accustomed to being lied to in the years since Viet Nam,
Watergate and all the other “gates”. But
this we cannot allow to go unprotested, this we cannot allow to continue. This is the cause they may unite a broad
coalition of responsible citizens to take action. If this doesn’t nothing will and, once a
people lose the passion for the fight, the fight is already lost.
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