10 Things Americans Underestimate About Our Massive Surveillance State

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http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/surveillance-nsa




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1. Underestimated: The National Security Agency’s abilities. The last time Americans focused on domestic spying as they have this week was a half-dozen years ago when the media broke the story that the Bush administration had placed data interceptors on key junction points on AT&T’s telephone network to try to trace calls by al-Qaeda. What Americans have underestimated is that as the Internet has grown and more data pathways have been developed—such as WiFi streams used in smart phones and other platforms—so has the NSA’s electronic dragnet.

2. Overlooked: The expanding NSA dragnet. This week’s revelations started with the UK Guardian publishing a copy of a secret federal intelligence court order that Verizon turns its customer’s “metadata” to the NSA. That was followed by the Washington Post’s scoop—from a whistleblower—of a new (to the public) federal domestic spying effort in which the biggest Internet companies were also told to turn over metadata, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others.

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3. Underestimated: The erosion of constitutional rights. For two centuries, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment barred the government from unreasonable search and seizure by police authorities. Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA intelligence analyst, told NPR on Thursday that collecting vast reams of electronic data was changing the "innocent-until-proven-guilty" foundation of constitutional law.

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4. Overlooked: How the NSA is getting away with this. If you really want to know how the NSA has been able to get away with this—and how the Obama administration has been able to say it has been doing nothing that has not been approved by Congress—you have to look at the reality that high-ranking lawyers inside the government have been exploiting legal loopholes to let NSA do what it wants.