Yesterday’s revelation that the Federal Government has been engaging in massive collection of customer calling records on millions of citizens is just now reverberating through the media and blogosphere. The LA Times’ Joseph Menn and James S. Granelli have this piece today about the specter of government snooping.
“This is the most comprehensive surveillance of the American public ever undertaken by the American government,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Information Policy Center. Said attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “There is simply no legal process for this kind of wholesale invasion of privacy. What they claim to be doing with the data is irrelevant because the fact is they could do whatever they choose without any oversight.”
The EFF has been on this case since January when it filed a suit against AT&T for violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the NSA. The lawsuit contends that AT&T has simply opened up its facilities and databases to the NSA for data retrieval, a chilling thought — no judge involved, no subpoena, no protection of any kind. (The LA Times had earlier reported that AT&T maintains a room dedicated to the NSA in its San Francisco office with of all e-mail and digitized voice traffic transmitted through the site.)
What’s striking is that so many press reports, as well as the EFF itself, have warned about the collaboration between the telcos and the government, and yet the issue has only caught fire now. I suspect the average citizen is more concerned about identity theft by scammers than they are about government tracking of their phone calls (to be fair, the data collection is intended to identify “patterns” and not individuals, although the phone numbers amassed can be used to track down individuals).
But, all of this news should be very disturbing to everyone — the power of a simple two-bit thief (or even an organized ring of thieves) is nothing in comparison to the Federal Government. And in these post-Katrina days, who can trust bureaucrats to behave responsibly with the data they receive?
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:55 AM|Comments(0)
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