If it is simple traffic analysis of phone calls and email, I'm not worried about this signals intelligence. But the vast scale of the program might lead to too many violations of civil liberties even if the percentage of violations (even if just from errors not malice) is very low. As the old sales pitch goes, they'll make their abuse on volume.
So what's up with this?
A pair of civil-liberties Democrats whom the White House tried to appease in a closed-door meeting warned today that fresh reports of thousands of privacy violations by the National Security Agency are just the “tip of a larger iceberg.”
On Thursday, the Washington Post published its report of a May 2012 audit leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden that found 2,776 violations over the previous year of executive orders and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provisions governing spying on Americans or foreign targets in the U.S. These included both computer and operator errors.
Snowden may have done a service by making us aware of the scope of the program. Why he had to do the douche bag thing of running to communist China and Putin's Russia is beyond me. He could have been a whistelblower. Now he's just an intelligence asset to be debriefed by a noticeably not-Reset Russia's intelligence services.
If I understand it correctly, a "violation" could mean one person or a million or so. It is quite possible that as a percent, those violations are a small proportion of the total. That may be the real problem even though I've read that (thus far) there haven't been deliberate violations of our privacy.
As I've noted many times here, our federal government is just too damn big. Fighting for control of the federal government loses sight of the fact that the sheer size of the federal government makes it almost irrelevant to fight for control of it. Momentum and reformers going native will keep the federal government rolling and growing. So the proper response is to shrink the scope of federal government actions. Make it less valuable to control and all sorts of problems--from deficits to campaign finance--become less important.
I think it is clear that the NSA program is too damn big. I'm comforted by the apparent fact that the program hasn't been deliberately abused. But that comfort only goes so far. The NSA program needs to be reduced by keeping only the vital parts and getting rid of the "nice to have" capabilities that are infringing on our civil liberties even if it is just a rounding error of a very high success rate.
I appreciate that to connect the dots of potential terrorist plots, we first need to collect the dots. But we are not dots.
UPDATE: Even if you aren't worried that President Obama or a future President Cheney would abuse this data, how sure are you that warehousing all this information in data hubs will be safe from Chinese or Russian hackers? I'm reasonably sure they don't care about our procedural safeguards even when they work perfectly.
