What’s all the fuss? It’s only metadata.

Posted on by

Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

So, if you’re a Verizon customer, your government knows who you called, where you were when you called them, where they were and how long you spoke with them. (To clarify, there are two surveillance programs in the news:  an named NSA program where phone records of Americans are the target of the surveillance and PRISM, also an NSA program, where on-line communications of foreigners are the target of surveillance.   Domestic surveillance is the big issue as far as I’m concerned.)  But, hey, no biggee because they didn’t record the actual conversation and there are checks in place to prevent abuse, right?   No reason to be uncomfortable with the fact that any calls you made to Tea-Party-sympathizer cousin or Occupy-Wall-Street-sympathizer brother-in-law are part of some government database, right?   Like I said, it’s only metadata and there are checks in place to prevent abuse.  Just listen to the president (after all, he’s listening to you…):

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution and due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

– Pres. Barack Obama, 7 June 2013

Ergo we have some problems here.  (Which of those would you say is the biggest howler?  I’ll go with “trusting the executive branch“.  I can’t say I trust Congress and placing trust in federal judges seems a sketchy proposition – prone to single point failures – but the executive branch hasn’t been trustworthy since when?… The Carter administration?   The Lincoln administration?)

From Rep. Mike Capuano’s e-newsletter yesterday (emphasis is mine):

Even if you can accept the government collecting the number and length of every call you make, are you really comfortable with them having the ability to catalogue all the YouTube videos you watch, the Netflix movies you download, or the web pages you visit? It seems that our own government has access to every phone call, email and internet search for all Americans at every minute of every day.

Like most Americans, I am absolutely outraged. But, if you’re a long time subscriber to these newsletters, you probably already knew that. You also probably know that I voted against passage of the so-called “Patriot Act” and every reauthorization since it first passed in 2001.

Before I go any further, I feel compelled to remind you that I was an early and strong supporter of President Obama.  I am still amongst the strongest Obama supporters in the House of Representatives.  Nonetheless, I cannot remain silent out of some sort of misplaced loyalty to President or party when I believe that basic American rights have been intentionally trampled.

I know we live in a dangerous world and there is work to do to prevent terrorists from harming us. But we must find a balance between giving law enforcement the tools they need to track and indentify terrorists and protecting the very liberties upon which our great country was founded.

This data collection has reportedly been going on for 7 years. The length of time that this has been going on and the staggering amount of data collected on every Verizon customer amounts to an incredible overreach. Even if you’re not a Verizon customer, there is clearly reason for concern. Who really believes that Verizon is the only telecommunications company required to turn over this data?  [Note:  They’re not.]

I have always believed that we must give law enforcement the tools they need to pursue criminals. However, we can do that and still protect civil liberties.

It is time for those of us who support President Obama to speak up.  I believe he is a good man and has been a good President.  However, I think his Administration has allowed their concern for our safety to lead them down the wrong path.  If we remain silent, those who have always wished him to fail on every point stand a better chance of winning the hearts and minds of America and we will all be worse off for it.  It is possible to support President Obama and yet disagree with him on certain issues – this is one of those times.

I don’t share Rep. Capuano’s confidence that Pres. Obama is a good man – perhaps he is in private but his actions as a public figure don’t do much to support that conclusion – but I concur that placing loyalty to the President or to the Democratic party over the good of the country is bad news.

The bigger picture, featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders (emphasis mine):

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blamed the members of Congress who continue to support the Patriot Act for the news that the NSA has been collecting millions of telephone records from Verizon.

In a statement Sen. Sanders said:

As one of the few members of Congress who consistently voted against the Patriot Act, I expressed concern at the time of passage that it gave the government far too much power to spy on innocent United State citizens and provided for very little oversight or disclosure. Unfortunately, what I said turned out to be exactly true.

The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Congress must address this issue and protect the constitutional rights of the American people.

While we must aggressively pursue international terrorists and all of those who would do us harm, we must do it in a way that protects the Constitution and the civil liberties which make us proud to be Americans.

Sen. Sanders is exactly right. The problem isn’t that the Obama administration used these powers. The real problem is that they shouldn’t have these powers in the first place. Congress has had three opportunities to say no to the Patriot Act. Instead, Democrats and Republicans both voted for the initial legislation in 2001, and reauthorized it in 2006 and 2011

Two takehome points:

  1. The government should not have these surveillance powers in the first place.
  2. Congress has had two opportunities to correct their original mistake, i.e., the Patriot Act, and failed to do so both times.  It was a bipartisan failure both times.

I’m a bit surprised that anyone would be surprised that PRISM existed.  That I’m not at all surprised may be due in part to the fact that one of my former colleagues worked on a Total-Information-Awareness-related project.  (I was actually his boss at the time.)  He couldn’t tell me anything significant about it.  From what I could infer however he was working with exactly the sort of data that PRISM was/is collecting.  (I had no insight into how broad a net was being cast to collect the data or the details of what was being collected but I had my suspicions.  I think William S. Burroughs was onto something with “A paranoid is a man in full possession of the facts.”)

Thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for blowing the whistle.

ADDENDUM:  A couple pieces in the NY Times relating the administration’s position and the (forced?) complicity of companies in addition to Verizon: