The NSA: Never Not Watching

Trailrunner7 writes "For many observers of the privacy and surveillance landscape, the revelation by The Guardian that the FBI received a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to require Verizon to turn over to the National Security Agency piles of call metadata on all calls on its network probably felt like someone telling them that water is wet. There have been any number of signals in the last few years that this kind of surveillance and data collection was going on, little indications that the United States government was not just spying on its own citizens, but doing so on a scale that would dwarf anything that all but the most paranoid would imagine." And now the Obama administration has defended the practice as a "critical tool."

Comments

Re:seems all the politicos are in favor

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The "critical tool" will become the only tool, and every problem will be a nail. Catch a drug dealer? Look at his phone records. Catch a tax cheater? His telephone friends probably cheat as well. Every government agency will want to get their hands on this "critical tool".

Water-boarding and other not-so-squeaky-clean methods of torture can also be a "critical tool" for extracting evidence from suspects. Let's get that practice up and running at every police station in the country. If we are going to shit-can the Constitution, we might as well go all the way, and be open and done with it.

The former East German secret police, the Stasi, had an extensive and effective network of "informal employees", who were basically informants who were threatened and coerced into cooperating. Their alternative would have been jail for "asocial behavior". They had wives spying on their own husbands. Yet another potential "critical tool." Lots of radical Islamic folks living in the US have relatives abroad. Well, they can choose to work with the NSA/FBI/CIA . . . or there might be a terrible "drone accident" where the relatives live.

Sociologists and psychologists like to define "power" in terms of how the behavior affects another. If you do something, and I change my behavior, you have power over me. If you do something, and I don't change my behavior, you have no power over me.

Given that a bunch of wacko Islamist terrorists have caused the US government to stray from the values embodied in the Constitution . . . those terrorists folks have a lot of power over the US government.