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September 22, 2013 Tomgram: Calabrese and Harwood, Privacy Down the Drain
In the U.S. these days, privacy is so
been-there-done-that. Just this week, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, a secret outfit that hears only the government side
of any argument and has generally been a rubberstamp for surveillance requests, declassified an opinion
backing the full-scale collection and retention of the phone records
(“metadata”) of American citizens. That staggering act was, the judge
claimed, in no way in violation
of the Fourth Amendment or of American privacy. She also gave us a
little peek at corporate courage in our brave new surveillance world, writing
that “no holder of records [i.e., telecommunications company] who has
received an order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the
legality of such an order.”
That story, like so many others in recent months, arrived thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden about the ever-widening powers of the National Security Agency (NSA), led by a general who, we now know, lives in a world of intergalactic fantasies of power and control out of Star Trek: The Next Generation and once even worked in an Army intelligence war room created by a Hollywood set designer in the style of that show. As Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood indicate today, however, gigantic as the NSA’s intrusions on privacy might be, they are only part of an uncomfortably large story in which many U.S. agencies and outfits feel free to take possession of our lives in ever more technologically advanced and intrusive ways. Just this week, in fact, the American Civil Liberties Union (for which both Calabrese and Harwood work) released an important new report on the post-9/11 morphing of the FBI into a “secret domestic intelligence agency.” In addition to the subterranean surveillance of protesters and religious groups, the Washington Post offered this summary list of the ways in which, according to that report, the Bureau has expanded in the twenty-first century: “The changes highlighted in the report include the FBI’s racial and ethnic mapping program, which allows the FBI to collect demographic information to map American communities by race and ethnicity; the use of secret National Security Letters, which asked for account information from telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and credit agencies and required no judicial approval; warrantless wiretapping; and the recent revelations about the government’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to track all U.S. telephone calls.” All of this and, as you’ll see in today’s piece, so much more has been done in the name of American “safety,” the mantra with which Washington has funded and built its new version of a global surveillance state. Tom Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone |