NSA surveillance. (image: Matt Mahurin/Reuters)
Not Outraged by NSA Surveillance? You Probably Just
Don't Know How Bad It Is.
By
James Bamford, Reuters
11 May 15
Last summer, after months of encrypted emails, I spent
three days in Moscow hanging out with Edward Snowden for a Wired cover
story. Over pepperoni pizza, he told me that what finally drove him to leave
his country and become a whistleblower was his conviction that the National
Security Agency was conducting illegal surveillance on every American.
Thursday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with him.
In a long-awaited opinion, the three-judge panel ruled
that the NSA program that secretly intercepts the telephone metadata of every
American — who calls whom and when — was illegal. As a plaintiff with
Christopher Hitchens and several others in the original ACLU lawsuit against
the NSA, dismissed by another appeals court on a technicality, I had a great
deal of personal satisfaction.
It’s now up to Congress to vote on whether or not to
modify the law and continue the program, or let it die once and for all.
Lawmakers must vote on this matter by
June 1, when they need to reauthorize the Patriot Act.
A key factor in that decision is the American public’s
attitude toward surveillance. Snowden’s revelations have clearly
made a change in that attitude. In a PEW 2006 survey, for example,
after the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed the agency’s warrantless
eavesdropping activities, 51 percent of the public still viewed the
NSA’s surveillance programs as acceptable, while 47 percent found them
unacceptable.
After Snowden’s revelations, those numbers reversed. A
PEW survey in March revealed that 52 percent of the public is now concerned
about government surveillance, while 46 percent is not.
Given the vast amount of revelations about NSA abuses,
it is somewhat surprising that just slightly more than a majority of Americans
seem concerned about government surveillance. Which leads to the question of
why? Is there any kind of revelation that might push the poll numbers heavily
against the NSA’s spying programs? Has security fully trumped privacy as far as
the American public is concerned? Or is there some program that would spark
genuine public outrage?
Few people, for example, are aware that a NSA program
known as TREASUREMAP is being developed to continuously map every Internet
connection — cellphones, laptops, tablets — of everyone on the planet,
including Americans.
“Map the entire Internet,” says the top secret NSA
slide. “Any device, anywhere, all the time.” It adds that the program will
allow “Computer Attack/Exploit Planning” as well as “Network Reconnaissance.”
One reason for the public’s lukewarm concern is what
might be called NSA fatigue. There is now a sort of acceptance of highly intrusive
surveillance as the new normal, the result of a bombardment of news stories on
the topic.
I asked Snowden about this. “It does become the
problem of one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic,” he replied,
“where today we have the violation of one person’s rights is a tragedy and the
violation of a million is a statistic. The NSA is violating the rights of every
American citizen every day on a comprehensive and ongoing basis. And that can
numb us. That can leave us feeling disempowered, disenfranchised.”
In the same way, at the start of a war, the numbers of
Americans killed are front-page stories, no matter how small. But two years
into the conflict, the numbers, even if far greater, are usually buried deep
inside a paper or far down a news site’s home page.
In addition, stories about NSA surveillance face the
added burden of being technically complex, involving eye-glazing descriptions
of sophisticated interception techniques and analytical capabilities. Though
they may affect virtually every American, such as the telephone metadata
program, because of the enormous secrecy involved, it is difficult to identify
specific victims.
The way the surveillance story appeared also decreased
its potential impact. Those given custody of the documents decided to spread
the wealth for a more democratic assessment of the revelations. They
distributed them through a wide variety of media — from start-up Web
publications to leading foreign newspapers.
One document from the NSA director, for example,
indicates that the agency was spying on visits to porn sites by people, making
no distinction between foreigners and “U.S. persons,” U.S. citizens or
permanent residents. He then recommended using that information to secretly
discredit them, whom he labeled as “radicalizers.” But because this was
revealed by The Huffington Post, an online publication viewed as progressive,
and was never reported by mainstream papers such as the New York Times
or the Washington Post, the revelation never received the attention
it deserved.
Another major revelation, a top-secret NSA map showing
that the agency had planted malware — computer viruses — in more than 50,000
locations around the world, including many friendly countries such as Brazil,
was reported in a relatively small Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, and
likely never seen by much of the American public.
Thus, despite the volume of revelations, much of the
public remains largely unaware of the true extent of the NSA’s vast, highly
aggressive and legally questionable surveillance activities. With only a slim
majority of Americans expressing concern, the chances of truly reforming the
system become greatly decreased.
While the metadata program has become widely known
because of the numerous court cases and litigation surrounding it, there are
other NSA surveillance programs that may have far greater impact on Americans,
but have attracted far less public attention.
In my interview with Snowden, for example, he said one
of his most shocking discoveries was the NSA’s policy of secretly and routinely
passing to Israel’s Unit 8200 — that country’s NSA — and possibly other
countries not just metadata but the actual contents of emails involving
Americans. This even included the names of U.S. citizens, some of whom were
likely Palestinian-Americans communicating with relatives in Israel and
Palestine.
An illustration of the dangers posed by such an
operation comes from the sudden resignation last year of 43 veterans of Unit
8200, many of whom are still serving in the military reserves. The veterans
accused the organization of using intercepted communication against innocent
Palestinians for “political persecution.” This included information gathered
from the emails about Palestinians’ sexual orientations, infidelities, money
problems, family medical conditions and other private matters to coerce people
into becoming collaborators or to create divisions in their society.
Another issue few Americans are aware of is the NSA’s
secret email metadata collection program that took place for a decade or so
until it ended several years ago. Every time an American sent or received an
email, a record was secretly kept by the NSA, just as the agency continues to
do with the telephone metadata program. Though the email program ended, all
that private information is still stored at the NSA, with no end in sight.
With NSA fatigue setting in, and the American public
unaware of many of the agency’s long list of abuses, it is little wonder that
only slightly more than half the public is concerned about losing their
privacy. For that reason, I agree with Frederick A. O. Schwartz Jr., the former
chief counsel of the Church Committee, which conducted a yearlong probe into
intelligence abuses in the mid-1970s, that we need a similarly thorough,
hard-hitting investigation today.
“Now it is time for a new committee to examine our
secret government closely again,” he wrote in a recent Nation
magazine article, “particularly for its actions in the post-9/11 period.”
Until the public fully grasps and understands how far
over the line the NSA has gone in the past — legally, morally and ethically —
there should be no renewal or continuation of NSA’s telephone metadata program
in the future.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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