Principled Umbrage

The Big One

About ten days ago rumours were circulating about "the big one"--a scandal that would rock the Obama Administration like none other to date.  It would appear that it has now "hit the fan".  We learn that the Obama administration has been exponentially expanding domestic surveillance upon all American citizens. 

Firstly, a summary of what has been going on:  the US government has been recording the "meta details" of all phone calls in the United States.  Meta details are not the actual conversation, but the number of the one making the call, the number being called, the time of the call and other data about the "event".  Experts say that it is a simple matter to cross reference other databases to establish the name, address, and identities of the callers and those they are speaking to, according to the Guardian:

But such metadata can provide authorities with vast knowledge about a caller's identity. Particularly when cross-checked against other public records, the metadata can reveal someone's name, address, driver's licence, credit history, social security number and more. Government analysts would be able to work out whether the relationship between two people was ongoing, occasional or a one-off.

Others are claiming that Obama is lying when he asserts that actual calls are not being listened to: in fact, they claim, the content of calls are being recorded.

The surveillance has moved from phones to the internet.
  Through the complicity (albeit denied) of internet service providers, the US federal government's spying agencies eavesdrop on all e-mails, i-phone conversations in real time.  The programme is called PRISM.  According to reports from an intelligence officer speaking to the Washington Post, and quoted in Breitbart:

. . . the National Security Agency and FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.” The program is code-named PRISM, and was leaked to the newspaper by a “career intelligence offer” who said, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”



The program was established in 2007, and grew exponentially over the next six years. The program was so secret that Congresspeople who knew about it were bound by law from talking about it. According to information leaked to the Post, PRISM was the central intelligence source for the President’s Daily Brief, appearing some 1,477 times in the last year alone. As the Post states, “the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.”



All of the biggest technology companies in America participate in PRISM, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Dropbox is coming next, according to reports.

Yup.  This is the big one.

Let's focus on some of the broader issues.  Firstly, the complicity of the dominant internet businesses, such as Google and Microsoft.  Their leaders and boards have not just been supine in the face of government overreach, they have been self-deceiving.  They appear actually to believe that they are lawfully complying with legal demands from the Federal government.  What it amounts to is doing what they are told with no questions asked--in exchange for immunity.  The government has stood over them and they have collectively complied.  Adam Smith was right: never trust a roomful of business competitors making decisions about their industry--their customers will suffer every time.

Here’s how the program works. Internet companies are given immunity by the government in exchange for accepting on-demand “directives” from the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence to open their servers to the FBI. In 2008, Congress gave the Department of Justice the ability to force compliance after receiving an order from a Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court. “[C]ollection managers in the NSA’s Special Source Operations group, which oversees the PRISM program, are drawn to the wealth of information about their subjects in online accounts,” the Post reports.

We believe those corporations need to be held accountable and the "immunity" they accepted from a corrupted Administration exploded. The fact is those corporations deceived and lied to their own customers and to the market as a whole.  Fortunately most of them are global companies, operating in jurisdictions which will not care a fig about US Federal Government immunities.  Let's hope they are taught such a lesson they will not make the same mistake for decades to come. 

Secondly, we all need to remember that this is where the Patriot Act has led.  It is an inevitable extension of that nefarious piece of legislation sought and achieved by President Bush.  It never had enough checks and balances.  It removed the check of arguing "probable cause" before a judge when it came to monitoring potential terrorist threats.  The very next administration has drastically expanded those powers way beyond the original intent of the law, all the while claiming that the threat of terrorism is now pretty much non-existent. 

This from the Guardian's Paul Greenwald, as represented in Politico:

Greenwald also told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the administration has taken a “warped and distorted” view of the PATRIOT Act, the legislation that authorized certain kinds of surveillance for security reasons in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.  “What the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so warped and distorted and it vests themselves with such extremist surveillance powers over the United States and American citizens that Americans, in their words, would be stunned to learn what the Obama administration is doing,” he said on CNN’s “The Lead.”

Probable cause is no longer necessary.  Universal government snooping  has been institutionalised by Obama into the "new normal".  We choked into our beer reading the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman's apologia for approving and keeping secret these nefarious extensions of state power.  These measures, she gravely told us, have "saved lives" channelling the infamous lines of the rogue Colonel Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men.

Thirdly, let's consider the political ramifications.  The hitherto supine media have turned (at least for the moment) upon President Obama and his administration.  When he started seizing the phone records of AP reporters it was a bridge too far.  The fawning left--those that have slobbered over Obama as a near messianic figure--are now bitterly angry.  It is clear they feel not just let down or disappointed, but betrayed.  They are acting as if they were jilted lovers--which in a sense they have been. 

It is possible that the principled anti-totalitarian Left and the principled libertarian orientated Right can forge a temporary alliance around these issues of government overreach and put in place prudent legislation with sufficient checks and balances to roll back government overreach for a long time to come.  Not likely.  But possible. 

We leave the last word to a New York Times editorial which displays principled outrage on the part of the Left.

President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights. 

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. 

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers. . . .

A senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

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That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. 

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where. This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy. 

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.” But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used? 

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”  That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

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We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” 

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.” . . .