While I don't think that there is any merit to arguing that because so many Americans voluntarily give up privacy to use Facebook and other online tools (or even just store loyalty cards) that we shouldn't mind the NSA violating our privacy, this doesn't sound so bad:
The NSA is governed by legal restrictions. It does not examine the full database. It searches individual numbers only after it has determined there’s a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a number might be linked to terrorist groups. In 2012, there were 288 of these findings. After one is made, the NSA can retrieve three items about the number: the dates of calls made and received for five years; the other phones’ numbers; and the calls’ length. The NSA is not entitled to listen to conversations, but it can order similar searches on the other numbers involved. Thousands of calls are caught in the dragnet, but the total is puny compared with the untold billions of annual calls.
The problem isn't what NSA looks at right now. That does seem pretty targetted. I didn't complain when this revelation was made under Bush and I won't complain now.
But there is that "full database" that is being looked at right now. That's new information to me in this latest round of debate.
Yes, the three items of the meta data are legally collected. Courts have held that to be so. But that was a ruling made in the days when the meta data was stored on 3 x 5 cards. The NSA may not look at the full database--but it owns the fully searchable full database. And it will save the full database for a long time at its discretion. That quantum leap in access makes the legality of having files of 3 X 5 cards way different.
I think we should amend the laws that make it just as lawful to keep forever a full searchable database of every phone call--even if only a little is looked at now for good reasons--as it was to keep 3 x 5 cards with the same data in a file cabinet.
At some point, that meta data is stale with little use in counter-terrorism and should be permanently erased. I don't think that the current program is illegal. But technology has made the potential for legal abuse bad enough that we need to redefine and restrict what is legal.
Remember, it isn't that things are wrong because they are illegal, it is that things are illegal because they are wrong,
