By Mickey Friedman
July 22, 2014
I had a lovely dinner at the always Pleasant and Main in Housatonic with my dear friend Patricia. I had a delicious pasta and she had the terrific chicken. We talked about a lot of things and then stumbled onto the NSA/government spying stuff.
It doesn’t really seem to bother her. She doesn’t feel like she’s got anything to hide. I wish I was more like Patricia. Because I go nuts about this stuff.
To me, the whole notion of privacy seems to have been turned upside down. I think privacy is sacred unless there is a clear, extraordinarily pressing emergency that justifies sacrificing it.
Today, the government believes that if there is any reason to suspect that you might know someone, or know something about someone, or have looked into any suspicious subject, they can suck up your phone conversations, tweets and texts, email, your Facebook posts, anything and everything you’ve sent into the digital universe. Then decide at a future date if you might have violated a law. Or not.
Of course, they won’t say this is what they’re doing.
After Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, went public everyone said that we weren’t really spying on Americans, only the foreign terrorists.
Remember “metadata?” Sen. Feinstein explained: “The call-records program is not surveillance. It does not collect the content of any communication, nor do the records include names or locations. The NSA only collects the type of information found on a telephone bill: phone numbers of calls placed and received, the time of the calls and duration. The Supreme Court has held this ‘metadata’ is not protected under the Fourth Amendment.
“This program helps ‘connect the dots’ — the main failure of our intelligence before 9/11. Former FBI director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified that if this program existed before 9/11, it likely would have identified the presence inside the U.S. of hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar.”
Or President Obama on The Tonight Show: “We don’t have a domestic spying program,” just “mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack.”
But here’s the latest. The New York Times wrote last week: “A new report based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden has identified five American Muslims, including the leader of a civil rights group, as having been subjected to surveillance by the federal government.”
A lot more spying than metadata.
But you might think five Muslims, 9/11, that’s not so bad. The government must have a good reason. Glen Greenwald in The Intercept named them: “Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush; Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases; Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University; Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights; Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.”
Whoops. Good innocent Muslims. Found in an NSA database of 7,485 email addresses monitored between 2002 and 2008. Someone convinced the FISA Court that these Americans ought to be watched, their privacy invaded.
And the Washington Post’s recent investigation of some of the Snowden files, 160,000 instant messages, emails, social media postings from 11,000 subjects, more than half Americans. They discovered that “Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks.”
Eugene Robinson of the Post wrote that close to 90 percent were just sucked up in the investigations of the 10 percent of people the NSA believed might be involved in suspicious activity.
These files “described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained … tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalaqued and recorded nevertheless.
“Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam …”
Personal, perhaps embarrassing information the NSA held onto. But most importantly, useless.
So is it possible the NSA analysts enjoyed peeping into the personal lives of these innocents, reading their love letters, monitoring their online flirtations … Is it exciting to watch someone else’s life? Especially when they don’t know you’re watching.
Remember when every teenage girl in America had a diary. And there was hell to pay if you peeked.
There’s got to be a better way to catch the terrorists than reading everybody’s diary.
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For more information:
Sen. Diane Feinstein: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/10/20/nsa-call-records-program-sen-dianne-feinstein-editorials-debates/3112715/
President Obama: http://www.newser.com/story/172164/obama-talks-terror-snowden-on-leno.html
New York Times “U.S. Spied on 5 American Muslims, a Report Says” by Charlie Savage and Matt Apuzzo, July 9, 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/us/politics/nsa-snowden-records-glenn-greenwald-first-look.html
Greenwald article on spying of U.S. Muslims: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/07/09/under-surveillance/
Washington Post “In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are,” by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html
Eugene Robinson “NSA’s misguided snooping on innocent people,” Washington Post, July 7, 2014: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-nsas-misguided-snooping-on-innocent-people/2014/07/07/3f6cb7b8-05f8-11e4-8a6a-19355c7e870a_story.html