Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America
America’s top national security experts say that the NSA’s mass surveillance program doesn’t make us safer … and that whistleblowers revealing the nature and extent of the program don’t harm America.
The top counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard Clarke – notes:
The just-revealed surveillance stretches the law to its breaking point and opens the door to future potential abuses
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I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly secretive.
The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.
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If the government wanted a particular set of records, it could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court why — and then be granted permission to access those records directly from specially maintained company servers. The telephone companies would not have to know what data were being accessed. There are no technical disadvantages to doing it that way, although it might be more expensive.
Would we, as a nation, be willing to pay a little more for a program designed this way, to avoid a situation in which the government keeps on its own computers a record of every time anyone picks up a telephone? That is a question that should have been openly asked and answered in Congress.
The author of the Patriot Act and chairman on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner – says:
Lawmakers’ and the executive branch’s excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are “a bunch of bunk”
The government has gone far beyond what the Patriot Act intended, and that section 215 of the act “was originally drafted to prevent data mining” on the scale that’s occurred
Whistleblower Edward Snowden is not a traitor, and Sensenbrenner would not have known the extent of abuse by the NSA and the FISA court without Snowden’s disclosures
The Patriot Act needs to be amended to protect Americans’ privacy
The former head of the NSA’s global digital data gathering program, William Binney:
Confirms Snowden’s allegations about the mass surveillance program
Says that revealing the details of the spying program will not harm national security … and that government officials are only mad because it exposes their overreaching
Says that massive surveillance doesn’t work to make us safer
Says that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be decrypted. But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not practical – purposes. Binney’s statements have been confirmed by other NSA whistleblowers...
But hey I have nothing to hide so what's the big deal. It has nothing to do with whether individuals do not care if the NSA listens to your phone calls or reads your e-mail. Whether you personally care about your rights and how they relate to the 4th Amendment and democracy, has nothing to do with hiding something. It has to do with a basic right to privacy. Anyone who loves big brother and does not think such programs should be closely monitored and have become excessive, by all means move to the 24 or so authoritarian regimes in the world, they love cooperate sheep like you. Are They Allowed to Do That? A Breakdown of Selected Government Surveillance Programs
