Conor Friedersdorf: NSA reforms should go beyond phone calls


Almost 10 months after Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government is spying on virtually all of us, using dragnet surveillance that tracks and stores all phone numbers we dial, President Obama has finally issued a proposal for reforming the National Security Agency.

The NSA would stop the mass collection of phone data. U.S. phone companies would continue to keep detailed records of every call that Americans make, and would be required to provide individual records to federal authorities should they ever lawfully request them.

And the NSA would need a court order before it could target a phone number for surveillance.

Records of all phone calls in America would also be kept for as little as 18 months, rather than the five years they're reportedly kept by the NSA. These reforms are better than nothing. If Congress passes them into law, our privacy would be better protected than it is now.

Necessary as they are, however, these reforms are not sufficient.

Under the new plan, the NSA would still be able to collect all phone records from innocent people suspected of no crime, so long as the innocents were within “two hops” of a suspected terrorist. In other words, the government gets all the numbers dialed by the suspect himself; but also the phone records of the people he called (one hop); and the records of the people they called (two hops).

Admittedly, this could prove useful to counterterrorism investigations.

Say one of the Boston Marathon bombers called a friend, John, who called five other phone numbers: A, B, C, D and E. Perhaps one of them has ties to terrorism, too.

Why not scrutinize them all?

On the other hand, the Boston bombers presumably called pizza delivery businesses and doctors’ offices. Should the thousands of Americans who happen to order pies from the same Papa Johns, or visited the same medical group, automatically have their private communications seized, scrutinized and stored by the government without any cause for suspicion?

That's guilt by association.

Adequate reform would require at least reasonable suspicion of a crime for all private communications seized and searched by the state.

Congress should also make sure that private information the NSA has accumulated in secret over the past decade is fully purged from the servers of government and private contractors.

Finally, there's the biggest problem with the proposed reforms: They deal only with phone surveillance conducted under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, even though NSA spying on innocent Americans goes far beyond that program. As civil liberties attorney Michelle Richardson put it, “This is an important first step for the protection of our phone records, but what about our Internet, financial, medical, political, library or other records?”

Those records are just as sensitive, she argued, if not more so: “They reflect where we go, the people we know, the churches and political parties we belong to, how we spend our money.”

Ending the phone dragnet is important. But it's as problematic for government to spy on email, traditional letters, or notes carried by pigeon. It all goes back to the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

In a Chicago Tribune editorial, “Congress, Tread Carefully on the NSA,” the newspaper's brain trust asserted that “the overarching goal for new legislation is the same as the NSA’s mission: Protect the American people.” In fact, the most important and enduring protection that U.S. citizens have enjoyed, for more than two centuries, is the United States Constitution.

NSA reform legislation should protect and defend the Bill of Rights. Liberty is the overarching goal.



User Agreement

Comments are encouraged, but you must follow our User Agreement


Programs & Promotions
Business Directory
Ads by Google