Trolling
Yesterday, in defending the program described in USA Today, the President said
I don't know about you, but I consider accumulating a list of the phone numbers called from my phone as intruding into my personal life. We can have a debate about whether the proper term is "mining" or "trolling" or "intruding" or "invading", but to suggest that merely collecting every number I call doesn't, in some way, provide the government with information about me is absurd.
That, in fact, is the whole point, as I understand it. The purpose of the program is to match that information, that calling pattern, with some pattern that the NSA has decided indicates a terrorist. The only sensible reason to collect this data is to dig through millions of calls (dare I say 'mine') to find the ones that betray the terrorists. The pattern of numbers you call is valuable information about your personal life, and is hardly being "fiercely protected."
Which doesn't even touch upon what else they might be doing with the data, once they have it. Their credibility about what they are or aren't doing isn't all that high, even in hearings before Congress.
(Perhaps Mr. Bush is playing the same game. Now that I'm looking in the dictionary, I see that it's quite plausible that they are not 'fishing by trailing a line, as from a moving boat' through our lives. There is no line, only computers and sophisticated numerical pattern analysis.)
I remain thoroughly unconvinced that the use of this data is, or will remain, limited in the way they claim it is, since they have a well-established record of claiming things which were not true, and working hard to obstruct any activity that might determine the validity of such claims. Often, however, their claims are absurd on their face.
For example, let's look that other assertions in the quote, that the activities are lawful and have been briefed to the appropriate members of Congress. Just this morning, Senator Patrick Leahy was heard on NPR saying he, as ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hadn't heard about it, that no one that he's spoken to, including people on the intelligence committee, had heard about it, and that he couldn't imagine any form under which it would be legal. Huh. (No wonder Cheney told him to go f*** himself.)
I've heard a defender of this activity suggesting that this sort of NSA activity was critical to catching potential terrorists. What is the logic here? Analogies in this area are always imprecise, but it does seem like finding that car companies are helping the government keep a record of everybody's car trips, because the NSA has a computer model that says people who visit both a nursery and a lighting supply store might be operating a secret dope grow-op.
In my United States, we don't empower widespread government surveillance of personal activity because it might help the government catch criminals. If it were possible to have little hovering camera robots follow everyone around, and transmit every minute of our lives to a central database, it would help us catch terrorists, but would we do it?
Under our Constitution, the government is specifically prohibited from doing various things that, if you were in power, you might like to do. If you were in power, you might even claim you 'needed' to do it, to be effective in your job. Too bad. You can't. The founders of our system decided it would be better to limit government, because the risks to individual liberty are greater than the virtues of an unlimited government.
In our modern society, our personal data is held by private individuals, organizations, and businesses in ways we don't allow the government to do. What's the distinction? My credit card company, though it knows a lot about me, doesn't have the power to throw me in jail, either here or in Guantanamo. The government gets to have the guns and the jails, and that's why they don't get to have other things.
Even if you think this NSA operation is an important way to "connect the dots" (and not just a way to accumulate more dots) that says nothing about whether or not the government should be allowed to do it. Currently, there is black letter law, founded on a principles contained in the Constitution, that says the government isn't allowed to do this and that businesses who hold this information aren't allowed to freely give it to them. I like it that way. It's none of the government's business who I call when. Even in a world where there are terrorists.
The government has lots of ways to protect us from terrorists, and probably many more effective ones, that it is not only allowed to do, but has been repeatedly encouraged to do, but it isn't. Yet they are doing things that seem both ineffective, illegal and profoundly at odds with the spirit of the Constitution. Does that make sense?
... the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat. Fourth, the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.I've also heard defenders of this program saying that they are not listening to the content of phone calls and emails. They're just tracking the numbers called.
We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.
I don't know about you, but I consider accumulating a list of the phone numbers called from my phone as intruding into my personal life. We can have a debate about whether the proper term is "mining" or "trolling" or "intruding" or "invading", but to suggest that merely collecting every number I call doesn't, in some way, provide the government with information about me is absurd.
That, in fact, is the whole point, as I understand it. The purpose of the program is to match that information, that calling pattern, with some pattern that the NSA has decided indicates a terrorist. The only sensible reason to collect this data is to dig through millions of calls (dare I say 'mine') to find the ones that betray the terrorists. The pattern of numbers you call is valuable information about your personal life, and is hardly being "fiercely protected."
Which doesn't even touch upon what else they might be doing with the data, once they have it. Their credibility about what they are or aren't doing isn't all that high, even in hearings before Congress.
[Representative Gerald] NADLER: Number two, can you assure us that there is no warrantless surveillance of calls between two Americans within the United States?Was Gonzales out-of-the-loop, lying, or merely engaging in a neo-Clintonian parsing of the word 'surveillance'? Me, I think that recording and keeping a database of numbers being called counts as "observation."
[Atty. General Alberto] GONZALES: That is not what the president has authorized.
NADLER: Can you assure us that it's not being done?
GONZALES: As I indicated in response to an earlier question, no technology is perfect.
NADLER: OK.
GONZALES: We do have minimization procedures in place...
NADLER: But you're not doing that deliberately?
GONZALES: That is correct.
(Perhaps Mr. Bush is playing the same game. Now that I'm looking in the dictionary, I see that it's quite plausible that they are not 'fishing by trailing a line, as from a moving boat' through our lives. There is no line, only computers and sophisticated numerical pattern analysis.)
I remain thoroughly unconvinced that the use of this data is, or will remain, limited in the way they claim it is, since they have a well-established record of claiming things which were not true, and working hard to obstruct any activity that might determine the validity of such claims. Often, however, their claims are absurd on their face.
For example, let's look that other assertions in the quote, that the activities are lawful and have been briefed to the appropriate members of Congress. Just this morning, Senator Patrick Leahy was heard on NPR saying he, as ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hadn't heard about it, that no one that he's spoken to, including people on the intelligence committee, had heard about it, and that he couldn't imagine any form under which it would be legal. Huh. (No wonder Cheney told him to go f*** himself.)
I've heard a defender of this activity suggesting that this sort of NSA activity was critical to catching potential terrorists. What is the logic here? Analogies in this area are always imprecise, but it does seem like finding that car companies are helping the government keep a record of everybody's car trips, because the NSA has a computer model that says people who visit both a nursery and a lighting supply store might be operating a secret dope grow-op.
In my United States, we don't empower widespread government surveillance of personal activity because it might help the government catch criminals. If it were possible to have little hovering camera robots follow everyone around, and transmit every minute of our lives to a central database, it would help us catch terrorists, but would we do it?
Under our Constitution, the government is specifically prohibited from doing various things that, if you were in power, you might like to do. If you were in power, you might even claim you 'needed' to do it, to be effective in your job. Too bad. You can't. The founders of our system decided it would be better to limit government, because the risks to individual liberty are greater than the virtues of an unlimited government.
In our modern society, our personal data is held by private individuals, organizations, and businesses in ways we don't allow the government to do. What's the distinction? My credit card company, though it knows a lot about me, doesn't have the power to throw me in jail, either here or in Guantanamo. The government gets to have the guns and the jails, and that's why they don't get to have other things.
Even if you think this NSA operation is an important way to "connect the dots" (and not just a way to accumulate more dots) that says nothing about whether or not the government should be allowed to do it. Currently, there is black letter law, founded on a principles contained in the Constitution, that says the government isn't allowed to do this and that businesses who hold this information aren't allowed to freely give it to them. I like it that way. It's none of the government's business who I call when. Even in a world where there are terrorists.
The government has lots of ways to protect us from terrorists, and probably many more effective ones, that it is not only allowed to do, but has been repeatedly encouraged to do, but it isn't. Yet they are doing things that seem both ineffective, illegal and profoundly at odds with the spirit of the Constitution. Does that make sense?
posted by Paul at 8:15 AM |
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