During his
speech on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs
today, President Obama trotted out the
familiar claim that mass collection of Americans’ phone records
could have prevented 9/11:
The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified
after 9/11. One of the 9/11 hijackers—Khalid al-Mihdhar—made a
phone call from San Diego to a known al Qaeda safe-house in Yemen.
NSA saw that call, but could not see that it was coming from an
individual already in the United States. The telephone metadata
program under Section 215 was designed to map the communications of
terrorists, so we can see who they may be in contact with as
quickly as possible.
As ProPublica’s Justin Elliott pointed
out last June, “U.S. intelligence agencies knew the
identity of the hijacker in question, Saudi national Khalid al
Mihdhar, long before 9/11 and had the ability find him, but they
failed to do so.” Furthermore, it is not clear why the NSA, having
eavesdropped on seven calls between al-Mihdhar and the Al Qaeda
safe house in Yemen, needed a database containing everyone’s phone
records to identify the source of those calls. The Justice
Department “could have asked the FISA Court for a warrant to all
phone companies to show all calls from the U.S. which went to the
Yemen number,” former counterterrorism official Richard
Clarke told ProPublica. “Since they had one end of the calls (the
Yemen number), all they had to do was ask for any call connecting
to it.”
It is telling that the administration cannot cite any examples
better than this weak counterfactual to illustrate the supposed
necessity of the NSA’s phone-record dragnet. As ProPublica’s Kara
Brandeisky
notes, “Obama’s own review group concluded that the
sweeping phone records collection program has not prevented any
terrorist attacks.”
The reforms Obama announced today confirm that the program’s
utility has been greatly exaggerated:
I am therefore ordering a transition that will end the Section
215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists, and establish a
mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the
government holding this bulk metadata….Effective immediately, we will only pursue phone calls that are
two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist
organization instead of three. And I have directed the Attorney
General to work with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court so
that during this transition period, the database can be queried
only after a judicial finding, or in a true emergency.
If such safeguards pose no threat to national security, why is
Obama acting only now? Because as long as the program was secret,
he did not recognize the privacy threat it posed. But now that it
has been revealed by a leak that Obama condemns, he realizes that
“without proper safeguards, this type of program could be used to
yield more information about our private lives and open the door to
more intrusive bulk collection programs.” He also suddenly is
troubled by the fact that the program “has never been subject to
vigorous public debate,” although his administration did everything
in its power to prevent such a debate.
The other reforms that Obama announced today—such as “a panel of
advocates from outside government to provide an independent voice
in significant cases before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court” and “additional restrictions on government’s ability to
retain, search, and use in criminal cases communications between
Americans and foreign citizens”—likewise could have been
implemented at any point between January 2009 and now. Since Obama
insists that “I maintained a healthy skepticism toward our
surveillance programs after I became president,” it’s strange that
he waited so long, isn’t it?
Obama cannot have it both ways. Either the government’s mass
collection of every American’s telephone records is essential to
national security, or it isn’t. Either the surveillance activities
that ignited public outrage when they were revealed last June
amount to nothing more than a “modest encroachment” that “the
American people should feel comfortable about,” as
Obama claimed at
the time, or they pose substantial threats to privacy that need to
be mitigated, as he indicated today. Either the reforms he
announced will protect Americans from indiscriminate snooping, or
they are mere window dressing aimed at “giv[ing] the American
people greater confidence that their rights are being protected”
(as he put it today) without actually protecting those rights.
Obama did manage to utter at least one important truth:
Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for
leaders to say: trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For
history has seen too many examples when that trust has been
breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our
liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it
depends upon the law to constrain those in power.
I believe this, but I do not believe that
Obama does.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1dYi3dT
via IFTTT