It really is appalling. The NSA's greed for personal information takes on the form of an addiction. "...If one tastes good, two will taste even better ... and a whole box-full doesn't seem unreasonable..."
The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners. ...NYT
When the government does this, it changes citizens into specimens. Citizens who aren't treated like citizens can hardly be blamed if they decide not to behave like responsible citizens. We aren't just changing the rules. We're opting out of democracy, a system that depends on responsible, independent, and private citizens.
This change began -- and this may tell you how responsible you are -- in 1979. Weren't paying attention?
The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. ...NYT
This report in the Times is interesting enough in itself. But added interest lies in the identify of the reporter. James Risen is still being pursued by the Justice Department for his investigative reporting during the Bush administration. He was assisted in this latest report by the documentary filmmaker who has focused on Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras.
Risen is the reporter who, on the eve of Bush's reelection, completed an investigative report into Bush's secret surveillance program. Bush might well not have been reelected had that report been published in the Times before the election. New York Times editor Bill Keller decided not to publish it before the election.
We need more people like Risen and Poitras if democracy is to survive. Most of all, we need fewer specimens and more citizens. It's a vicious circle, well-documented by George Orwell and others...
