NSA-Verizon Surveillance: Welcome to the United States of Total Information Awareness

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http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/surveillance-information-awareness.html

NSA-Verizon Surveillance: Welcome to the United States of Total Information Awareness
Posted on 06/06/2013 by Juan Cole

It turns out that the National Security Agency demanded and got Verizon phone records of all US telephone calls, mobile and otherwise, within the US and between the US and abroad, from mid-April of this year. The order, obtained by The Guardian and which I guess the government would say it is illegal for us to even look at, is being reprinted in the US press.

The secret demand, which itself was classified, was made under the so-called USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which desperately needs to be repealed or struck down as unconstitutional.

Note that the NSA did not do wiretapping. It isn’t looking at the content of the calls. Nor is personal information attached, so it is just records of one number calling other numbers. They have been data-mining the millions of records. By now the NSA and CIA have databases of numbers used by suspected al-Qaeda operatives, against which the calls could be matched. If an interesting pattern emerged (30 US Chechens regularly calling a certain number in Daghestan, e.g.), the NSA would have to get a warrant to discover the identities of the callers. But of course they could easily arrange that, having established that a pattern exists that justifies further investigation.

This sort of fishing expedition can sometimes be useful to counter-terrorism, but fishing expeditions into private papers and records are a violation of the US constitution. The government should only be allowed to see private information if there is reasonable cause to think something illegal is going on. Going looking into private records to see if patterns emerge that suggest illegality is the action of a totalitarian government, not a democratic one. The USA PATRIOT Act was a Sovietization of American law and practice and 2001 was year one of the fall of the Republic, when the Fourth Amendment and aspects of the First Amendment were abrogated.