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Someone’s not telling the whole truth.
In the wake of the news leak that the National Security Agency is engaged in a wide-ranging surveillance program of Internet users through a system called Prism, the world’s biggest technology companies responded by unilaterally denying any involvement in the government’s spying apparatus. And yet President Barack Obama and the United States director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., have publicly confirmed the existence of the Prism system, without providing any details about it. Of course, the news — as well as the responses — raises doubts about who is telling the truth and about how extensive the spying program really may be. But perhaps just as important, the episode also raises questions about how publicly traded companies with hundreds of millions of consumers — companies that are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission — can, and should, react to news when pressed about involvement in confidential government programs.
Tech Companies Tread Lightly in Statements on U.S. Spying
The leaks by Edward Snowden reveal a vulnerability in U.S. intelligence since 9/11, triggered by a surge of information collected on people around the world and the proliferation of private government contractors to store, sift and manage it. Snowden and other private employees with permission to plug directly into National Security Agency systems have unprecedented access to highly sensitive information—the result of years of pressure to break down the walls dividing U.S. intelligence agencies and share information that might expose the next terror plot.
Thousands of workers employed by government contractors sit side by side with federal workers and hold security clearances that provide access to intelligence databases. The result is a system so enmeshed that government and contract workers are often indistinguishable. In 2012, some 22% of people holding security clearances were contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, down from more than 25% in 2009.
US Relies on Spies for Hire to Sift Deluge of Intelligence
When the federal government went looking for phone numbers tied to terrorists, it grabbed the records of just about everyone in America. Why every phone number? "Well, you have to start someplace," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told NBC News.
That breadth, that willingness to sweep up enormous information on Americans with no ties to terrorists, is making it hard for the Obama Administration to tamp down controversy over a separate program, called PRISM, to monitor Internet traffic. In short, critics ask, if looking for terrorists means collecting every American's phone records, how can anyone believe the President when he says Americans aren't being monitored on the Internet?
The law says the government must limit its surveillance to people "reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." But everything hinges words such as "targeting" and "collecting," which have unique meanings in the spy world.
What's the problem with PRISM?
The Obama Administration thinks it can prevent terrorism by collecting and linking immense volumes of private phone call, credit card, and Internet data. Unfortunately, as the Administration trades privacy for intelligence insights, President Obama is exchanging a cherished American value for an unproved theory.
The Obama Administration loves data. It argues that the president was reelected because of its enormous people database and use of polling and social media. And the Affordable Care Act is built in part on a belief that massive troves of electronic health records will pave the way for predictive algorithms that will prevent costly hospital readmissions, or identify medical practices that lead to better patient health. But the evidence for big data is scant at best. To date, large fields of data have generated meaningful insights at times, but not on the scale many have promised.
Big data NSA spying is not even an effective strategy
Forget PRISM, the National Security Agency's system to help extract data from Google, Facebook, and the like. The more frightening secret program unearthed by the NSA leaks is the gathering and storing of millions of phone records and phone-location information of U.S. citizens.
According to current and former intelligence agency employees who have used the huge collection of metadata obtained from the country's largest telecom carriers, the information is widely available across the intelligence community from analysts' desktop computers. The data is used to connect known or suspected terrorists to people in the United States, and to help locate them. It has also been used in foreign criminal investigations and to assist military forces overseas. But the laws that govern the collection of this information and its use are not as clear. Nor are they as strong as those associated with PRISM, the system the NSA is using to collate information from the servers of America's tech giants.
This is, hands down, the scariest part of the NSA revelations
[Commentary] It's official. We are living in a surveillance state.
This week's revelations that wave after wave of Verizon call data, and an endless sea of emails and Facebook posts, are all being trawled by government dragnets are shocking but not really surprising. We've known for years that the government's intelligence machinery has invisible means of cultivating and harvesting personal data in service of a war against terror that has taken over not just America's foreign policy, but also our inboxes and homepages. Like the video footage of the backpack-laden Boston bombers melting into the crowd, this week's disclosures are just an in-your-face reminder that forms of privacy once taken for granted -- getting lost in a crowd or maintaining a private email account -- are all but gone. The idea that new technologies can be simultaneously indispensable and dangerous isn't new. That the popular addiction to email, texting, Facebook, and YouTube will keep usage levels high virtually no matter what is revealed about where posts may wind up should not be confused with public consent to ever more encroaching surveillance. As long as the programs remain even partially secret, that consent can never be fully informed. There is no substitute for courts, legislators, and executive branch officials taking responsibility to ensure that, in trying to protect American society, we don't destroy what we love most about it.
[Nossel is the executive director of PEN American Center]
Obama’s Surveillance State
[Commentary] In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.
Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution. Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous. Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate the revelations by Snowden and, I hope, others to come might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the bill of rights. Snowden did what he did because he recognized the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect.
[Ellsberg is best known for leaking secret documents known as the Pentagon Papers]
Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America
The disclosure of details about how marquee U.S. tech companies co-operated with PRISM, the clandestine national security program to ferret out terrorists, shows how methodically and conservatively the program is being carried out.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk erected what the New York Times describes as "locked mailboxes" in which to place data on suspicious persons requested by the government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Times' description, published Saturday, used unnamed sources. The tech companies have said they obeyed the law of the land while participating in the PRISM program. The specific data requests, as well as the data transfers, were blessed by a federal judge and vetted by corporate attorneys. And use of a highly secure digital storage location to make the data hand off is a tried-and-true methodology used on Wall Street for more than 20 years.
PRISM data transfers done conservatively
[Commentary] When Americans expressed outrage last week over the seizure and surveillance of Verizon's client data by the National Security Agency, President Obama responded: "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance."
How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies.
These are the "details," and few Americans consider this approach "balanced," though many rightly consider it Orwellian. These activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific—"particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." And what is the government doing with these records? The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department? If this is the new normal in America, then Big Brother certainly is watching and it's not hyperbolic or extreme to say so. Nor is it unreasonable to fear which parts of the Constitution this government will next consider negotiable or negligible.
Big Brother Really Is Watching Us
[Commentary] Apparently the “chilling effect” of Justice Department leak investigations on communications between government officials and the press has not been so chilling after all. It certainly did not deter former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has admitted that he is the principal source of recent leaks to The Post and the Guardian revealing top-secret NSA programs tracking terrorist communications. But instead of being outraged by the damage done by these leaks, critics on the left and right are criticizing the NSA for undertaking activities that are lawful, constitutional and absolutely vital to protecting the country.
Calm down, folks. Big Brother is not watching you.
Why does the NSA need to collect all that data? One former national security official explained it to me this way: If you want to connect the dots and stop the next attack, you need to have a “field of dots.” That is what the NSA is collecting. But it doesn’t dip into that field unless it comes up with a new “dot” — for example, a new terrorist phone number found on a cellphone captured in a raid. It will then plug that new “dot” into the “field of dots” to find out which dots are connected to the new number. If you are not communicating with that terrorist, your dot is not touched. But the NSA needs to have the entire field of dots so it can unravel the network connected to that terrorist.
[Thiessen is a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute]
Big Brother isn’t watching you