Trashing the Law against warrantless GPS tracking: NSA nabs 5 Billion Phone location Records a Day
http://www.juancole.com/2013/12/trashing-warrantless-collecting.htmlTrashing the Law against warrantless GPS tracking: NSA nabs 5 Billion Phone location Records a Day
By Juan Cole | Dec. 5, 2013
Remember when the National Security Agency officials maintained that they were only collecting metadata from your cell phones? What they meant by that was that they werent listening in on your calls, just noting who you call and when. I said at the time that metadata on cell phones inevitably includes information on where you are, so that they are tracking people.
So it turns out that the NSA is actually collecting 5 billion records a day on the location of cell phones around the world, according to the Washington Post, which is using the Snowden leaked documents. The NSA officials deny that they are intentionally collecting that data from American phones inside the country, but of course the way this kind of data works, it is inevitable that a lot of Americans end up having their locations swept up. Plus tens of millions of Americans travel abroad every year. Do we give up our constitutional rights with regard to our own government the moment we leave the shores of the US?
The NSA is carrying out the equivalent of putting Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) device on millions of Americans persons. The FBI also tried putting GPS trackers on cars of people they were investigating and just tracking them for a month to six months without a warrant. This is illegal, as the Third Circuit Federal Appeals court in Philadelphia has recently ruled. The government argues that when people are moving around in public it is legitimate to monitor them and they have no expectation of privacy. The judges find that actually people dont expect someone to be following their every move 24/7 for months on end, and do have a right to more privacy than that unless police can convince a judge there is a reason to issue a warrant. The problem is that Americans being tracked usually dont know it, and so far the courts have protected the government from having to answer to lawsuits from potentially affected classes of person, on the ground that their standing has not been proved. But there isnt any difference between tracking us intensively the way the NSA does and tracking us with a GPS device (indeed, the NSA is getting GPS information).
If you had alleged when the Snowden revelations began that the NSA was watching 5 billion cell phones move around, people would have accused you of being crazy. One after another, Snowdens leaks have shown a situation that is a trillion times worse than the one portrayed by officials. Snowden said that the NSA had tapped into the servers of Google, Yahoo and others and could see us writing an email in real time. Keith Alexander and James Clapper, both of them notorious liars and very likely personally corrupt, said Snowden didnt understand how the system worked. Google and Microsoft and the others were puzzled because, they said, they hadnt given the government access to their servers in generally, only to individual accounts suspected of being national security threats. But then it turned out that the NSA had exploited weaknesses in the routing between servers to insert themselves into the data flow. They had it all. Then it turned out that the government is monitoring everyones bank accounts and credit card transactions.
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
Pholus
(4,062 posts)Of course the ability to verify that is classified. We have to take their word. Oh yeah, and they
have demonstrably lied to you before too...
The total costs for Intelligence of all sorts adds up to 10% of the entire defense
budget. Yeah, some of it is necessary, but the case has not been made that
this this vast ready-to-be-abused trove of intercepts has actually been useful
to plot detection, which is the only way this has been sold.
Those "54 thrwarted plots" from this summer certainly haven't held up to scrutiny it seems...
http://www.propublica.org/article/claim-on-attacks-thwarted-by-nsa-spreads-despite-lack-of-evidence
Daily Kos was even less generous....
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/03/1243770/-NSA-Dir-Gen-Alexander-Admits-Gov-t-Lied-About-54-Plots-Thwarted-By-Surveillance
Certainly, there is a forensic value to being able to go back through a permanent record and scrutinize EVERYTHING a particular individual did after the fact (AND EVEN MORE VALUE IN LOOKING FOR DIRT IN YOUR OPPONENTS), but if that's what you're doing be honest and sell THAT to the American people and put it up for a national referendum.
Betcha that would be a bit less popular...especially if the individual abuses and massive program costs were disclosed honestly.
Hubert Flottz
(37,726 posts)No wonder the fucking government is broke!
Dustlawyer
(10,495 posts)Especially since we put no protections in the way to stop or monitor it. Interesting!
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
jeff47
(26,549 posts)If you read the actual article, you'll find they did mention they aren't collecting data within the US. US persons outside the US may be getting their location recorded, but that's actually legal - there's an exception in the law for inadvertent collection.
But that wasn't sufficiently evil, so reporters continue to write sloppy stories where they ignore the "not in the US" part of the leak. Like this story.