Senators, civil liberty activists criticize data-mining.
By Dileep Thekkethil
The Obama administration is under fire from a broad spectrum of groups, ranging from liberal to libertarian, over the disclosure by The Guardian and The Washington Post that the U.S. government has been engaged in a data-mining operation of breathtaking scope.
The Guardian reported Wednesday that the National Security Agency was collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers “under a top secret court order issued in April.”
The massive eavesdropping, in the pretext of counter-terrorism, is said to be the biggest phone call data collection ever in history.
Metadata is details such as phone numbers and email IDs, timing of communications, locations of people that are communicating.
The order, a copy of which was 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 United States and between the U.S. and other countries. The details include the duration of each call, the receiving number and the location.
Citing documents, the Post reported Thursday that NSI and the FBI “are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.”
According to the newspaper, the program, “code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now.”
The controversial Patriot Act, first enacted in the aftermath of 9/11, gives the U.S. government authority to collect “business records.” But some critics argue that the current surveillance goes way beyond that.
“In a digital world, metadata can be used to construct nuanced portraits of our social relationships and interactions,” wrote Jay Stanley and Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union in an opinion piece published on the Reuters website.
“It’s long past time for Congress to update our surveillance and privacy laws to ensure that before the government can go digging through our digital lives, it needs to demonstrate to a judge that it has good reason to believe we’ve done something wrong.”
In an article posted on Cato Institute’s website, Julian Sanchez, a research fellow with that organization, calls for an “an Inspector General audit of this program, both to look for abuses… and to skeptically interrogate the claim that such sweeping collection is somehow indispensable to national security.”
Several congressional critics of various U.S. government surveillance programs also lambasted the administration.
“I am deeply disturbed by reports that the FISA Court issued an extremely broad order requiring Verizon turn over to the National Security Agency on a daily basis the company’s metadata on its customers’ calls,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said in a press release issued on Friday. “Under this secret court order, millions of innocent Americans have been subject to government surveillance.”
In a joint statement Friday, two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
They wrote: “[We] believe statements that this very broad Patriot Act collection has been “a critical tool in protecting the nation” do not appear to hold up under close scrutiny. We remain unconvinced that the secret Patriot Act collection has actually provided any uniquely valuable intelligence.”
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