Let’s talk about the spying issue... sort of. More specifically, let’s talk about why privacy matters, and let’s do that by shooting down the premium grade idiocy spewed by so many on the issue of privacy. Ug. This stuff drives me nuts.First, let me get two things out of the way.
● Liberals..... Bush Started It!: The liberal defense seems to be that all of this began under Bush. That’s not actually true. The specific things Obama is doing began in 2008 after the Pelosi-led Congress amended the Patriot Act to allow this. But even more importantly. . . so what? This isn’t some program Obama just uncovered. He authorized it. He’s been running it since 2008. He’s been briefed almost 1500 times using information obtained from this program. Obama did this. Whether or not Bush did it too does not excuse Obama’s misconduct - he even ran against this very issue in 2008. It’s time you leftist yahoos admit that your heroes do rotten things and you can either disown them for it or you need to STFU.All right, now that we’ve moved past the theater, let’s talk about why it matters that the government is spying on phone records, internet activity, credit card activity, e-mails, phone calls, web searches, etc.
● Conservatives.... That Rotten Obama!: A lot of conservatives are screaming about how unAmerican and dictatorial this is. But let me point out that this power was given to Obama through an amendment to the Patriot Act after Bush’s attempts to do the same thing were struck down by the courts. More Republicans than Democrats voted for it. In fact, as much as I hate giving Democrats credit for anything, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Mark Udall (Colorado) tried to warn the Senate about this but nobody listened. And at the time, many of these same conservatives (like Rush who now calls this a “coup”) were attacking the people who opposed this as “weak on terror” or worse. So don’t buy the self-serving selective memory. Conservatives need to decide if we want freedom or not, and stop buying the idea that anything the government wants for policing or military or fighting terror should be automatically given. Rand Paul has already introduced a bill requiring Obama to get a warrant before he can snoop and, unsurprisingly, few conservatives are supporting him.
Unfortunately, explaining why this matters is difficult because when you try to warn people you inevitably face the old, “Why should I care? I have nothing to hide.” Ug. Morons. Whether or not you have anything to hide misses the point. Privacy laws like those afforded by the Constitution are not intended to protect people who have something hide. No. Indeed, they are NOT meant to protect the guilty at all. What they are meant to do is to protect the innocent from being wrongfully accused. Think about that for a moment.
Now let me explain. You think you have nothing to fear because you’ve done nothing wrong. Ok. Well, I hate to break this to you, sunshine, but whether or not you’ve done something wrong is not actually all that relevant to whether or not you end up in jail. If you become the target of a government investigation and the government can go snooping through your life and recording your phone calls, you will be convicted... whether you did anything or not.
But wait, you bleat... “Why would the government care about me? I’ve done nothing wrong.” Well, for starters, think about the conservatives now being audited because they donated to Romney or spoke their minds. Do you think they did anything wrong? What about the journalists Obama designated as terrorists just because they were writing stories he didn’t like. Did they do something wrong? Or how about this... suppose your cousin runs drugs or sells kiddie porn. Do you want to bet that you aren’t going to be investigated too? Ever transfer any money to his account for any reason? And for those of you who are sure your cousin wouldn’t do that, do you know that your coworkers or neighbors don’t? Heck, for all you know, this blog is a front for a terrorist cell (the Commentarama Liberation Army) and Uncle Sam is about to give you the finger-wave to see if you were part of it.
Still not convinced? Ok, consider this... most people get investigated because someone turns them in. And I’m not talking about a co-conspirator, I’m talking about a jealous ex-girlfriend, an angry co-worker, a fired employee, a crazy neighbor, or an angry child who didn’t like being grounded.
Guess what happens then? Then the government starts their investigation. When the law works as it should, they need a good deal of evidence before they can start snooping into your life. They rarely have cause to go fishing through your e-mails and there are no recorded phone conversations. Consequently, these false allegations typically fall apart fast for lack of evidence.
But you had nothing to hide, so you are cool with letting the government have the power to check you out. Now suppose you were accused of child abuse or child sex. You who “has nothing to hide” suddenly have the government digging into your life. Do you remember that call you made last year to your cousin when you said you let your kid drink some wine because they wanted to taste it? Do you remember that joke you e-mailed about strangling your kid? How about that picture you took of your kid naked in the tub because you thought it was so cute? How about the picture of the time little Johnny ran into the wall and ended up all black and blue? You don’t remember that, huh? Well, the government does and it’s going to call all of that a pattern of behavior, and it’s going to use that pattern to assert a right to take your kids away for questioning... where a trained “expert” will teach them that you touched them inappropriately.
Think it can’t happen? Go read about the ritual-sexual-abuse day care scandals: LINK.
Look, I’ve been a lawyer long enough to tell you that this is how it happens. When you are accused, the government works hard to prove your guilt... not determine your guilt. To do that, it strings together anything it can that might fit a pattern and it calls that a pattern. It uses the same false reasoning that leads people to see conspiracies where there are none by assuming that unrelated things are related. And it leaves it up to you to disprove your guilt... if you can. I’ve seen the government obsess over a single off-the-cuff ambiguous remark in a single e-mail out of thousands and call that “definitive proof of guilt.” I’ve seen prosecutors zealously struggle to prove obviously false allegations and keep out proof that the accuser was lying. I’ve seen witnesses lie, prosecutors lie, judges act on bias, experts who are paid to lie, etc. Innocence doesn’t matter once you are become a target.
This is why privacy matters. When the government is given the power to dig through your phone calls, your e-mails and your other communications, it will always be able to find something to convince itself that you are guilty of something. And if you get noticed for whatever reason, the government will use this stuff to get you. The fact that you “have nothing to hide” won’t matter a hill of beans at that point.
That’s why these things matter. Not because guilty people need protection, but because everyone is at risk when the government is given the right to go fishing.
54 comments:
If I may quote K... he asked this in the open thread:
"So, Edward Snowden. Hero whistleblower or commie agent?"
Good question. From what I'm seeing, he's probably more of a libertarian. What that makes him on the scale above, I'm not sure. Personally, I think the government needs to be reined in. I think it has way too much power and few know what it's really doing. So in that sense, I put him into the hero category. On the other hand, I would say that he's deeply embarrassed the country and that was his intent, so that makes him a provocateur. But the fact he's shocked so many people suggests that maybe he was right that this is something the public doesn't want the government doing.
So I would put this in the positive category overall.
Let me add, not to defend the guy because I don't know enough about him to do that, but compare this to Wikileaks. This guy apparently saw something he thought was wrong and he leaked proof of the program. I see no evidence that he leaked technical schematics or agent names or anything like that. That's classic whistleblower behavior.
Wikileaks, on the other hand, claimed they just just wanted to shine a light on misconduct, but they release names of people who helped the US as well as other details that obviously would put people at risk.
I do think the difference is meaningful.
I forget what prompted it, but I received this piece of advice from my divorce attorney: Don't get CPS involved because you WILL lose your kids.
That advice was confirmed by a social worker I am acquainted with who used to work for CPS. She left because she couldn't stand their practices.
They don't investigate anything until after the children have been taken from their home. Because they operate on an assumption of guilt, most of the social and foster care workers immediately begin poisoning the children against their parents. Errors are not admitted and it is considered a failure if a child is reunited with the parents regardless of the circumstances.
tryanmax, That's true of most government agencies. In my experience (and I've dealt with cops, state investigators, CPS, FBI, DOJ, various IGs, Secret Service, IRS, EPA and more) I have found that it's MUCH more common that once your name comes up, they actively try to prove your guilt rather than determine your guilt. Their goal is not truth and justice, it's conviction. And if they have the power to snatch your kids or your business they will take it and then go digging for more.
And I'll tell you, I have seen whole investigations based on obvious throw-away comments in e-mails or unverified secret witness statements whose identities were never revealed and the supposed evidence supporting them was never produced. I've seen prosecutors and judges work to keep out all manner of proof that the accuser was lying. I've seen investigators put words in people's mouths. I've seen them correct the story of accusers to fit the evidence. I've seen crime labs lie through their teeth about what can and cannot be done -- I know of at least three instances where hundreds of convictions had to be thrown out because crime labs were making up evidence to tell the cops what they want to hear rather than just reporting what they found.
If the government notices you... it will get you. That's why it drives me nuts when people say, "Duh... I have nothing to hide." It doesn't matter what you have to hide. When you give someone the power to control you, they will.
as much as I recognize the difficulty of trying to keep citizens safe in today's world, there can be no question that government will abuse the power they are granted or take for themselves.
Jed, I think one of the problems is that this doesn't really make us any safer. It's like the airport screenings. It creates a massive government power to interfere, but it doesn't result in anything.
And the more unchecked a power is, the more likely it is to be abused.
Moreover, it's a legitimate question whether or not this might even make things worse. When the government has power like this, it tends to use that instead of trying to come up with better means of achieving the same end. That makes it sloppy and slow to react.
Thanks for the privacy reasoning Andrew. Sometimes I have difficulty when confronted by the default "I don't have anything to worry about because I haven't done anything wrong" lumpen prol.
Snowden is no Daniel Elsberg. Which is why I'm kinda suspicious. In the olden days, Soviet spies would "defect" when on the verge of getting caught and a big press conference would ensue where they would catalog the evils of the US and the virtues of their Soviet masters. If Snowden has knowledge of PRISM et al, he'd be very valuable to the Chinese who are always looking for cyber vulnerabilities and ways to keep their spies from getting caught.
And giving money to Paul is no guarantee he wasn't being bankrolled by the Reds. Spies are sneaky that way.
Quoting Iowahawk tweet: Nothing says "patriotic commitment to civil liberties" like threatening to defect to China.
Hopefully this will result in curtailing the scope of the present surveillance state. If that happens I won't care which side he was on.
Troubling, but I figure its the way of the world nowadays. What tech makes possible happens. If some scientist ever invested mindreading tech, within a year or two the government would be using it.
I suspect the only shred of privacy comes from the fact that the government (and others who collect info) are drowning in data.
Most people will give up liberty for safety and comfort (especially other people's liberty) and the same way criminals tell themselves the possible criminal sentence is irrelevant because they won't get caught, private citizens tell themselves the ever more piercing gaze of big brother doesn't matter because it won't fixate on them.
K, granted "spies are sneaky like that" but Snowden has denied plans to defect to anyplace when directly asked about it. Then every pundit on every side took that denial and turned it into an affirmation. What Snowden has said is that he is seeking asylum from anyplace that will grant it.
There is a lot of reporting on multiple subjects right now that places information and quotes beneath blatantly contrary headlines. Of course, that makes it virtually impossible to determine the truth of a matter from a single source. Which is the simple recipe for affirming all the different things everybody wants to believe simultaneously. After all, they heard it on the news, even if they didn't.
I don't have a lot of time this morning, so for now I'll just say that the "Bush did it too" defense from the Left baffles me, at least when applied to Obama. Weren't these liberals the same ones who, back in 2008-09, were ecstatically announcing that Obama's election marked a new age in politics; that the new POTUS, unlike Bush, was someone who believed in "the rule of law"; and that the age of the Patriot Act and Gitmo was over?
Hey, I'm willing to admit that I feel differently about civil liberties under Obama than I did under Bush. But at least I acknowledge some degree of possible hypocrisy.
Not here to defend him but Rush did make one good point on Friday. If this was so important to National Security, how come it didn't prevent the Boston Bombing? At least one of these guys was fingered by the Russians (obviously not deep enough).
I don't mind using these tools to go after a criminal but I do mind using it to fish. It is intrusive and unnecessary.
I think most states have in the alcohol laws that it is legal for a parent to provide alcohol to their children in private situations. I first noticed this when reviewing the law in Montana when I was 18. It was legal for my dad to give me a beer at home.
Well said, Andrew.
What was even more hysterical was hearing Obama say last week during one of his bumbling speeches, "Just trust us..."
Yeah, right.
K, Agree. If this results in a curtailment of the surveillance society, then it was good thing no matter what his motives. As for what his motives are, I'm not sure. He's apparently trying to flee to Iceland rather than China now, so maybe that suggests he was more neutral than people might think.
All in all, I don't see him as evil yet. I did with the others before him because they didn't care who they hurt. This guy, so far at least, seems to have kept the harm he's done at the policy level. That tends to make me think his motives are more genuine.
In terms of the "I have nothing to hide" argument, it drives me nuts. Pretty much anyone who has ever been involved in the justice system knows how arbitrary and how vindictive it can be. We see hints of it all the time when schools expel kids for things that we think no sane person would expel anyone for, when we see people recant rape allegations, when we see people like the Atlanta bomber cleared. Yet, most people keep thinking "I've got nothing to hide... I'm safe."
Anthony, Exactly right on all counts.
1. If government can use a thing, they will use a thing.
2. Just like criminals think they won't get caught, innocent people think they won't "get noticed."
3. And the only real privacy we have right now is that there is too much data. BUT keep in mind that computers are changing that. They allow the data to be gathered into files that make sense to humans.
If I can get your social security number (and I can), then I can find out an amazing amount of information about you in one or two places. Pull a public records search sometime (which doesn't even need a social) and you'll see property owned, cars, addresses, phone numbers, names and phone numbers of family, names and phone numbers of neighbors, criminal charges, bankruptcy and a slew of other things. Add a credit check and I know a ton more about you. Do a quick online search and odds are I'll find out about most of your habits through your Facebook page. If I was Google, I could even track where you've been online.
I think the key to protecting people is to put this stuff off limits to the government without a really strong reason to look for it, AND I'd like to see a requirement of genuine consent before most information can be shared by private persons.
tryanmax, I haven't actually followed what Snowden is doing because, honestly, I don't think he's important. What is important is the question of whether or not we should be doing this.
And while most people do seem to be outraged, it is important to note that most defense hawks are already defending the program. So this is not an issue like the IRS scandal where everyone agrees it was wrong and the question is "did they or didn't they." This time the issue is "should we or shouldn't we" and for people who are outraged, they should realize that a big chunk of people are absolutely fine with this. So the question is, what do Americans want?
T-Rav, It's even worse than that -- Obama ran against the Patriot Act!
That makes this intense hypocrisy! There is no way at all they can not hold this against Obama and yet have any credibility on these issues.
At this point, I think it's safe to say that the left has no values at all except "whatever our guy does is right and what your guy does is wrong."
I haven't followed Snowden either, but the smear campaign against him is already on. I just for once had the wherewithal to take mental notes as it came across.
Andrew, are you saying the government knows about my kitty porn ring? I guarentee that all my actors where of age. My biggest customers are old ladies and tom cats.
Koshcat, A couple points.
1. The reason this wouldn't have caught the Boston bomber.... I saw that argument this weekend and it fundamentally misunderstands how this program works and how the use of information works:
(1) This program apparently does not spy domestically. It spies on foreign communications that pass through the US -- like requests to servers in America or phone lines that route through America. So unless the guy was overseas typing online in a US-based website about his plans to do something in the US, he would never have been noticed by this program. In other words, this program could not have caught the Boston bomber because he was domestic and they weren't using it to spy domestically.
(2) Rush misunderstands the problem of volume. There are roughly three billion people online, each of whom is constantly doing and saying things that would set off this program. It may be possible to narrow that down by computer, but trying to pick out any single terrorist in that stream of humanity would be like finding a particular grain of sand at the beach.
This is the problem of films. I talked about this in the open thread actually. People have gotten this idea from films that the NSA has this ability to see anything, then analyze it and to watch it in real time. "Bring up the satellite, let me see what he's doing right now." That's fantasy. The government doesn't have anywhere near the resources to track more than a handful of people... out of billions.
(3) There is a fundamental difference between knowing that people visit terrorist-related websites and knowing they will act as terrorists. Rush is assuming that once we know someone has visited such a site, then we know they will act as terrorists. That's hindsight thinking at best. The truth is that spotting a pattern of behavior before the person acts is infinitely harder than seeing it after the fact.
Moreover, Rush sidesteps the problem that if we did round up everyone who visited such a website, then Rush would be the first to scream that we've become Nazi Germany and people have rights.
So I think that argument fails all around.
(continued)
Koshcat (continued)
2. On using this stuff against criminals, I have no problem with that either, so long as the government can prove it has cause to use these tools against people and that they are used narrowly to investigate what the government thinks they are doing. The problem with the open-ended fishing stuff is that the government will always find something to pin on you if it is allowed to do this.
The real problem though is ensuring that the government only targets people who likely did something. When we think of "criminals" we think of the cops being out there and tracking a killer based on physical evidence. But more often than not, the people designated as criminals are simply people who were reported to the authorities for whatever reason. Then it uses that to get a warrant to go fishing. And once it starts, it become tenacious.
I think our system needs a cleaning to make it harder for the government to act before there is some level of proof and to shift the government back into the mode of looking for the truth rather than looking to convict.
tryanmax's example of CPS is a good one. In my experience, they want to grab people's kids (especially if you've only been accused of something minor). The IRS is the same -- they want so seize your assets immediately. Why? Because you're going to cut a deal if you're starving and your business is dying. You are more likely to fight if they have to prove your guilt first.
3. I haven't looked at the alcohol laws, but I can assure you that it's not a blanket immunity and they will throw it in as part of pattern and then leave it up to you to prove "it was only a taste." The problem is that even if you can disprove 10 allegations, the fact that you needed to disprove 10 allegations gets seen as proof of something. That, sadly, is human nature.
Writer X, Thanks! Good to see you again! :)
Yeah, that was pretty ridiculous. We who have seized your healthcare against your will, lied through our teeth about it, spied on you, targeted you with the IRS and EPA, been selective in our prosecution, apologized to foreigners for you being such jerks, given your tax money to our crony friends... we now want you to trust us.
Yeah, right.
tryanmax, What fascinates me about this whole area is that there is no one more hated than a whistleblower even when they reveal an abuse that people want stopped. You will see this every time. The government does something evil. Person X exposes it to the world. The world demands that it end while simultaneously sneering at the whistleblower for daring to betray the government.
I don't get it.
And in this case, I think you're likely to hear a lot of confused doublespeak. Look at the people who initially said that if you didn't support this, then you are a traitor. Now they are screaming that this is evil. Those people "think" (emote actually) in old patterns of thought without actually reasoning through what they are saying. Thus, betraying a secret of the military is evil. Betraying an IRS secret is not depending on which president is in charge. Spying on the public is evil. Not letting the military spy on the public makes you an enemy sympathizer. It's nonsensically contradictory, but it makes sense to them.
Koshcat, I hear that kitty porn is huge! LOL!
As an aside, I have yet to work in an office without a "cat person." Cubicles full of pictures of cats... in clothes... destroying furniture... in supposedly cute poses... with bizarrely un-motivational words written on the picture "Mr. Cuddles makes life go by quicker." Yikes.
I completely see your point and I took the situation about the Boston bombers a little differently. Here you had an individual brought to the attention of the US government and even with this system in place they still couldn't prevent it. If it can't work in that situation, how is it suppose to protect us by fishing? My point is it doesn't or at least they haven't convinced me that it can.
Ah, yes, I was talking about something different. The article I read this weekend was asking the question differently. It was suggesting that the government CAN see all, but only chooses to see what it wants to. And, since it doesn't want to see Islamic terror, it basically turned a blind eye to the Boston bomber as supposedly proven by this system not finding the guy. That's not correct.
In terms of your point, I think the intelligence community has a lot to answer for when it is told by other intelligence communities to watch someone and it doesn't.
And I don't think that fishing helps at all. To the contrary, I think that technology presents a false hope. People see it and they think, "If we could only figure out the right pattern of behavior, then we could spot people before they act." But there is no right pattern of behavior. And the real key to stopping people like this is human intelligence rather than anything you can find by machine. Unfortunately, snooping by machine is easier and it tricks people into thinking they are getting quality information... when they aren't.
There seems to be a pattern with democrats of wishing technology would take the place of spies. Clinton really harmed the CIA by making all these rules limiting what the individual personel could do; it seems that Obama is doing the same thing. Like you say, you cannot really replace human intelligence. It's weird because it is almost like they feel it is more ethical if you kill or destroy someone by just pushing a button than with a trained individual.
Koshcat, Liberals get really strange when it comes to these people. For example...
Under Clinton, they decided that the CIA should not deal with people who are unethical. Yet, those are the very people who are likely to deal with the CIA. They instead decided that they could spy using technology alone -- primarily tapping phones and using satellites. It never occurred to them that you need to figure out who to spy on before you can do that.
At the same time, liberals don't like the idea of killing anyone unless it's done one-on-one in a fair fight. The idea of bombing someone from a safe distance or even overwhelming them by superior fire power offends them. They call it "proportionality" and they claim they "want a human at the switch," except that they really want the human to put themselves in a position where they are at risk.
In the 1960s, liberals were all for eliminating most conventional weapons because now that we had nukes, we would never need them again.
In the 1970s, they decided that the nukes had to go and we should always fight conventionally.
In the 1980s, it was fine that we had long range nukes, but short range nukes were evil. What's the difference?
In the late 1980s, they decided that it was wrong to defend ourselves against nukes because that would make us aggressive if we wouldn't all die if we started a nuclear war.
Their history in these matters is messed up. They flip back and forth from mistake after mistake, always taking things to extremes, and their sole concern is always making sure that enough Americans die if we do anything to make it seem fair.
The current administrations love of the drone would be another flip-flop as well.
Isn't being a spy against your own government by definition unethical?
True. Interestingly, Obama keeps saying, "Oh yeah, drones are horrible and we'll put rules in place to stop them... for the next guy." Since liberals have no values, they are buying this.
Yes, spying against your own government is unethical. It's also a crime. Moreover, the people who do that are often guilty of other crimes as well. Or consider al Qaeda. Most of them are criminals. They've blown people up, stolen, sold drugs, laundered money, etc. If we exclude criminals and the unethical as informants, then how do we get any of them to help us? It's self-righteousness masquerading as morality.
OFF TOPIC ALERT!
Why does it seem many members of our government blatently ignore some of the basic rights laid down in the Bill of Rights?
Your example here seems like a clear violation of the 4th amendment. I see it no differently than if the FBI started randomly searching all homes for contraband.
The IRS often blatently violates both the 4th and 5th amendments by seizing assets prior to even charging you with a grand jury. The EPA was trying this and recently got their hands slapped.
Does the 14th amendment apply to just the states or to the states and feds? The way it is written it seems to only apply to states. I think the feds violate this on a routine bases whenever they pass a law and then give out excemptions, especially to themselves.
Not to blow my own horn, but I was pretty prescient when I recommended that conservatives care more about privacy as a way to make the GOP look modern.
I do not agree with the defense of this program that some conservatives put up. Wrote Andrew McCarthy at NRO:
"Telephone record information (e.g., the numbers dialed and duration of calls) is not and has never been protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court held as much in its 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision. Understand: the phone record information at issue here is very different from the content of telephone conversations. (....)
Unlike the content of your communications, you have no expectation of privacy in your telephone activity records. If you think about it for a second, you know you don’t. If there were a mistake on your phone bill – for example, if you were charged for a long-distance call you didn’t make — you would expect to be able to call your phone company and have the problem addressed. That is because you understand that, when you make a call, this information is not secret: your phone company keeps records of whom you called and how long the call lasted. A phone record is, by nature, a record of information shared with third-parties. It is not like personal papers and other personal items you keep in your home – items the government may not search without a judicial warrant (except in certain circumstances not relevant to this discussion).
But the thing is, yes, I do expect it to be private. Absolutely. I enter a contract with a private corporation on the understanding that they will not publish certain personal information, and that they use data only to fulfill a contract or to the degree I consented to, or in any case in ways that are not harmful to me.
People are ok with giving certain data to credit card companies, retail chains or their smartphone - that does not mean they mean to share the same info with their friends, employer or the government. Obviously. In fact they would rather give it to a corporation than their boss.
Most of all they do not expect one entity to put all the data from all other entities together, under their name. In 1979 there was no way a "phone company" could create a complete record of your movements, communications and information habits and then for the government to take it and store it forever, to be used against you.
The idea that info shared with third parties is not meant to be private strikes me as dangerous.
Koshcat, That's not really off topic. It's all kind of the same thing. The 14th Amendment applies to both. And I think the government ignores those amendments because (1) it can and (2) because it makes life a lot easier for the government to be able to do what it wants.
And I agree with the analogy about searching homes. It is the same thing.
El Gordo, Trumpet away! :)
I think that privacy is becoming a huge issue and the GOP needs to adopt it if they want to start winning over the public at large.
On the NRO article, McCarthy's description of why phone usage records would not be private is faulty. Privacy is about the government's right to know... not about whether or not you and a third party both know. In other words, privacy doesn't vanish just because you share it. Otherwise, your home could not be considered private once you let a contractor in to fix something. Privacy exists where you have a reasonable expectation to control who can or cannot know about your information.
And in the case of companies, there is typically an expectation of privacy to a degree. First, the company has privacy rights. That's why the government needs a warrant to start looking through records in the first place. If they show up with one, the company will often than have an obligation to notify you that your records have been demanded -- that depends on their agreement with you. Now, some companies may choose to cooperate, but that doesn't change the fact they have the right to resist. In either event, the government can't just show up and start flipping through records.
I also agree that even greater privacy concerns exist now that it's a lot easier to collect all this information.
"What fascinates me about this whole area is that there is no one more hated than a whistleblower even when they reveal an abuse that people want stopped."
Well put. I was struggling to articulate that disconnect even to myself. Just this morning as I listened to the radio, my mind was warping while some yahoo said that the people absolutely have a right to know this stuff and there ought to be a public discourse, but this guy should totally face criminal charges.
To some degree of credit, the guy likened it to Birmingham civil rights protesters who willfully got arrested in order to challenge the laws. What he doesn't understand is that different circumstances call for different measures, and to say this guy should face prosecution to legitimize his point is like Ghandi telling the Jews to passively resist the Nazis (which he did).
tryanmax, I recognize it, but I'm at a loss to truly understand it. It seems to be true though that people hate whistleblowers even if they think the thing the whistleblower reported needed to be told. It's a puzzling mindset.
Andrew, I did not plagiarize him, but now I see Charles Cooke at NRO made the same argument:
"When I entered into arrangements with American Express, Google, and AT&T, I took a calculated risk with my privacy. I took that risk with American Express, not with the federal government; with Google, not with President Obama; and with AT&T, not the national-security services. Are we to presume now that all private agreements implicitly involve the state? And if so, where is the limiting principle? If I am to expect that private information I keep on a server run by a private company will be routinely accessed by the government without my knowledge, then why would I not also expect that private belongings I keep in a storage unit run by a private company will be routinely accessed without my knowledge? At what point did it become assumed in free countries that relationships between free citizens and free businesses were not sacrosanct? And if privacy is not expected, what explains the furious denials of participation from the likes of Google?
This distinction between privacy in the concrete and in the virtual worlds is silly in principle and even sillier in practice. As Justice Potter Stewart, writing in Katz v. United States, explained in 1967:
"The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
(...)
The Fourth Amendment exists now for precisely the same reason that it existed in 1791: to ensure that, in the absence of extremely compelling situations, Americans are not subject to casual government scrutiny. Its authors understood that knowledge is power, and that, as there is no justification for the state to have too much power over you, there is also no justification for the state to have too much knowledge about you."
Andrew, I must admit I´m confused about the background and the timeline of the law and the programs. The reporting on this subject is not good. What is this 2008 amendment of the Patriot Act that you mentioned?
I always understood that it is, as you describe, about foreign communications routed through the US or with at least one end in a foreign country. Many conservatives defended it on exactly those grounds when Bush was President and the left called it "warrantless wiretapping". Now both right and left sound like PRISM went beyond that. Is there anything new about this scandal at all?
If not, both sides are a bit deluded. Nevertheless, bipartisan outrage should be useful. Better than silence.
El Gordo, This:
The Fourth Amendment exists now for precisely the same reason that it existed in 1791: to ensure that, in the absence of extremely compelling situations, Americans are not subject to casual government scrutiny. Its authors understood that knowledge is power, and that, as there is no justification for the state to have too much power over you, there is also no justification for the state to have too much knowledge about you."
...is extremely well said. That is exactly right, and that is what this program and others like it violate. And they do it by claiming that they are only looking for bad guys, and unfortunately, too many people fail to understand how the government will abuse this.
On what the PRISM program does exactly, the reporting has indeed been horrible. I took my information about it from the originally couple reports that broke the story and from a lengthy article in the Mail Online which outlined it. From what I've read, it appears that this was a program which only monitored foreign activity as it passed through servers and phone wires in the US. At this point, I have no reason to believe it was more "domestic" than that.
Here’s the timeline as I understand it:
The program under which PRISM was handled began in the 1970s. It was a program that allowed the government to work with “trusted” American companies to spy on foreign nationals. After 9/11, the NSA was criticized for its inability to monitor the modern communications grid, including the internet. (Up to that point, they were basically monitoring Soviet/Russian satellite signals.)
In response, Bush set up the “Terroris Surevillance Program.” This program was heavily criticized for monitoring people supposedly without warrants as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The program was challenged in court. In August 2006, it was ruled unconstitutional by a District Court. That was overturned on appeal on other grounds. As the law suits continued, Bush’s administration (the Attorney General) informed Congress that the program would not be continued.
In response, Congress passed the Protect America Act of 2007, which authorized the NSA to start the PRISM program, so long as the targets were overseas.
Private companies refused to participate, however, because they claimed they would be sued for participating. So in 2008, Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide legal immunity to companies who cooperated in collecting this data.
Microsoft apparently came on board before that and the others followed.
Without comment... here are some children's books that deal with the NSA issue.
LOL!
I particularly like the Waldo one.
Next question: If the IRS has been co-opted for political purposes why not the NSA? To a first approximation, this would be like watergate times infinity.
= Joe the Plumber.
Outstanding post, Andrew and great comments!
I concur that "fishing" for "evidence" is wrong, wrong, wrong!
If we truly wanna be effective in catching terrorists we would implement the methods Israel uses.
But, too many idiots (ie bureaurats) are either too incompetent to do it or too afraid of being politically incorrect...or both.
I seea pattern of abuseof powerby virtually every gvt.agency be it IRS, EPA, NSA,State Dept., FBI, etc., etc..
This has got to stop. No, it's not like Enemy Of The State stuff but we are heading inthat direction, even if we don't have those capabilities...yet.
Computer programs make up foe a lot of that but many of these programs ain't designed to find real evidence...the Truth to put it plainly.
It's clear that the govt. has waaay to much power and It's clear they can and will abuse it...and us.
We need to all hammer these points as much as we can because if we don't get more folks see how an out of control govt. is evil we will end up withmore of it until all our liberties are gone...only to be rationed out as the govt. sees fitto their friiends only, of course.
This ain't paranoia, it's the truth, and it's happening now. I hope enough folks wake up and realize it soon...and do something about it before it's too late.
Land of the free? Not so much at the moment.
PS, I was leery of giving Bush these powers for this very reason. I could see the logic in targetting foreign communications but it sure didn't take much to include domestic as well. Particularly with an Admin. that doesn't sees our liberties as a threat tobe neutralized rather than goin' after the truth without violating our rights.
Er, I meant a govt. that does rath than doesn't see our liberties as a threat. Typing on an IPad is harder than a regular keyboard.
At the same time, liberals don't like the idea of killing anyone unless it's done one-on-one in a fair fight. The idea of bombing someone from a safe distance or even overwhelming them by superior fire power offends them.
Andrew, that brings to mind a story in one of Stephen Ambrose's books, about a WWII vet who had served in the Air Force and was talking about his experiences to a college class in the '90s somewhere. Obviously there was a lot of bombing of civilian targets, which he took part in, and at the end a student in the audience raised his hand and asked, "So, when you were bombing all these people who had never done anything to you, how did you feel about that?" Yeesh. That sums up the liberal worldview in a nutshell.
I keep wondering what happened to Echelon. No one has mentioned that system.
The thing that concerns me is the selection of targets by these people. They go after the most law-abiding people(overall), they publicly say Tea party people are a huge problem. But yet nothing has surfaced that has proven that point. Imagine how much energy has been wasted trying to find something on us. Yet no avail.
This kid that was an apparent leaker, I think is a plant. He didn't do anything that would shut down the system. He adds to the message of fear that Obama has been putting out. Then disappears, it's something that raises my antennae. Perhaps I've seen to much nonsense from these people, to believe anything that's being reported.
K, Who knows?
Ben, Thanks! I think the key to using power effectively and without abusing it is to be much more careful in how it gets used. Broad-brush, non-discriminatory power is dangerous. The government needs to get better at narrowly targeting the people who need to be targeted. Only then should they be allowed to use their power.
I was leery of giving this power to Bush too because even if you think the current guy won't abuse the power, the next guy will.
And you are right, this not the land of the free at the moment and too many people like it that way.
T-Rav, That's despicable, but it's typical for a lot of liberals -- judging people by unfair standards they would never accept on themselves and then being self-righteous about it.
Max, I knew someone in the mid-1990s who ran an office that did that. As far as I know, they still do.
Echelon was a subject on Art Bell many times. How they described it, it sounded much worse than anything today. But that's how that show would go, according to some shows. The new world order would have taken over the world by now, and most us would have been culled because there are too many people. The entire world would be underwater, the US would have put out all it really knew about aliens. Superstorms would have ravaged the world, and Bill Clinton would have the done honorable thing and stepped out of office when he perjured himself(I made that one up).
Didn't Echelon monitor international communication? I remember guys making fun of the keywords that would raise a flag in the system.
Max, My understanding as a total outsider was that this thing monitored phone calls, looking for "code words," which would trigger recording. Beyond that, I have no idea.
As for Art Bell, he's "for entertainment purposes only". Sadly, a lot of people don't realize that. And yeah, if anything he said was true, we would all be dead by now... and then some.
I miss his shows, every now and then he would bring on some real stuff. One of my favorites was a guy who wrote a book on UFOs, his angle was what people were seeing was the state of the art aircraft of the time.
He would bring on real technical people, which was really good.
What killed it was the people who committed suicide, expecting to be taken away on a spaceship following the Hail Bop comet. I think that would be too much for anybody.
And is something to keep in mind with our news cycle. It only shows people will believe anything. Nobody(but us) gets P/Oed at the IRS singling out a group of people on political beliefs. But gathering out personal data, Katy bar the door. Meanwhile the IRS situation is clearly breaking a number of laws, but people do not have a clear idea about privacy laws. Which to my understanding is very complicated.
Max, The IRS thing has people furious across the political spectrum and there is a huge backlash in the works.
That said, everyone is more upset about things that happen to themselves rather than others.
Andrew, thanks for your explanation. I can almost understand why it all sounds so innocuous to some people when explained in a calm authoritative voice. "Now don´t you worry. It´s been tested on animals."
You're welcome, El Gordo. It does sound kind of innocuous when you talk about it in technical and legal terms. That's one of the problems with humans. Unless something is graphic, it rarely gets most people's attention.
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