The New York Times
reports that the Obama administration plans to end the National
Security Agency’s mass collection of innocent Americans’ telephone
records, a program that has generated concern and criticism across
the political spectrum since it was revealed last summer by
newspaper articles based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden. Under legislation the administration plans to propose, the
Times says, records would be retained by phone companies
for the usual 18 months, as opposed to the five years of metadata
stored by the NSA. The government could obtain information about
particular targets and their contacts through individualized court
orders rather than the blanket orders that purport to authorize the
NSA’s current database. The legislation “would also include a
provision clarifying whether Section 215 of the Patriot Act, due to
expire next year unless Congress reauthorizes it, may in the future
be legitimately interpreted as allowing bulk collection of
telephone data.” While these reforms are welcome, they should not
blind us to three important lessons from this episode:
Everything was fine as long as it was
secret. President Obama was perfectly comfortable
with the NSA’s database until the general public learned that it
existed. Even then, he
described the routine collection of everyone’s phone
records—information that can be
highly revealing—as a a “modest encroachment” that “the
American people should feel comfortable about.” Only when it became
clear that large numbers of Americans were not in fact comfortable
with this massive dragnet did Obama begin to express
concern about the privacy threat it poses. The members of the
Senate and House intelligence committees also knew about the phone
record database before the rest of us did. With a few exceptions,
such as Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.),
they were not troubled by it either. “This is just metadata,”
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.) told reporters
after the story broke. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
secretly certified the program as consistent with both the PATRIOT
Act (a point
disputed by that law’s chief author) and the Fourth Amendment.
Obama, back when he was defending the phone record dragnet instead
of calling for its abolition, argued that all three branches of
government had signed off on it—a disconcerting reminder of how
national security claims can nullify checks and balances.
The program was essential until it became
dispensable. The Obama administration and its
defenders in Congress claimed the NSA’s mass collection of
telephone metadata was essential to national security, but they
could not cite a single example of a terrorist attack thwarted
by the program. By agreeing to end the database, Obama has conceded
that all the talk about how vital it was in protecting us from
terrorists was nothing but bluster—a point to keep in mind the next
time the government says civil liberties must be sacrificed in the
name of safety.
Whistleblowing is a crime. None of the
reforms Obama is now advocating would have happened without
Snowden’s leaks. Neither would the broader debate about privacy and
national security that Obama
claims to welcome. But according to Obama, the proper reward
for this public service is a lengthy prison term. Something is
wrong when the man who reveals the government’s disturbing
surveillance activities is treated as a criminal while the man who
endorsed those abuses poses as a privacy advocate.
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