Saletan: The NSA’s Phone-Call Database: A Defense of Mass Surveillance
Here’s an excellent piece by William Saletan: The NSA’s Phone-Call Database: A Defense of Mass Surveillance.
Some facts to counter the raging paranoia and fear-mongering of the libertarian left:
It sounds as though NSA goblins have been studying everyone’s phone calls. But that isn’t how the program works. It’s a two-stage process. The first stage—collection—is massive and indiscriminate. The second stage—examination of particular records—is restricted. We can argue over whether this two-tiered policy is too intrusive. But either way, our debate about it has focused on the wrong stage. The problem isn’t the data collection. It’s how the data are used.
The first document published by the Guardian, an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, instructs Verizon to “produce” to the NSA electronic copies of “all call detail records” related to phone calls within, to, or from the United States. Although the order pertains only to the date, length, and phone numbers involved in each call—not to what was said—it’s still a colossal demand. But what happens to the data once the NSA gets it? James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, gives this account:
“The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications. Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time. … By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. … The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization. … Only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed because the vast majority of the data is not responsive to any terrorism-related query.”
In other words, the rules that most of us would apply at the collection stage—reasonable suspicion, specific facts, court approval—are applied instead at the query stage. Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA, CIA, and national intelligence office under President Bush (no, he didn’t hold all three of those jobs at once), describes how the program operates. “The government acquires records … from the telecom providers, but then doesn’t go into that database without an arguable reason connected to terrorism to ask that database a question,” Hayden explained on Fox News Sunday. For instance, “You roll up something in Waziristan. You get a cell phone. It’s the first time you’ve ever had that cell phone number. You know it’s related to terrorism because of the pocket litter you’ve gotten in that operation. Here’s how it works: You simply ask that database, ‘Hey, any of you phone numbers in there ever talked to this phone number in Waziristan?’ “
Note the indefinite past tense. The analyst asks whether any of the numbers in the database has ever talked to the number in Waziristan. That’s why the database is colossal: Its aspiration is to capture and preserve records of every call so that no potential lead is missed. Big Brother isn’t watching you. But he does want your records in the database so that if any number you called later surfaces in a plot, he can look back through history, spot the connection, and check you out.
Note that Saletan is not blindly supporting this massive data collection, either. He concludes by making the point I’ve tried to make all along — that there needs to be more transparency about what is being collected and how it’s being used. That would go a long way toward counteracting the hysterical accusations made by demagogues like Glenn Greenwald.
