This week's revelations about Prism, code name for the US government's surveillance system for foreign electronic communications, and the collection of telephone call metadata from Verizon sounds really familiar.
In a paper I presented at the 2004 American Political Science Association meeting, I wrote:
Of questionable legitimacy are Echelon and Carnivore, two United States government programs that seek to extract information that people would like to keep secret: information related to national security and terrorists’ plans and information related to criminal activity. Echelon is apparently a collaborative system used by the US, New Zealand, the UK, Australia, and Canada, that intercepts various kinds of electronic messages and uses computer routines to sift through the vast amounts of data looking for security-relevant keywords. Questions have been raised about what kind of oversight is being used to make sure the civil liberties of citizens are not being infringed upon.Similar questions have been raised for Carnivore, a way for the FBI to conduct surveillance of a suspect’s on-line activities. Whether the law limits the FBI to collecting information in the headers or allows the collection of message content (which might reveal the private information of people who are not suspects) is not yet clear. Civil rights advocates maintain that Carnivore potentially violates Constitutional protections against “unreasonable search and seizure”(American Civil Liberties Union 2003). Because programs like Echelon and Carnivore are, themselves, secret, finding out what information they collect is problematic, and determining whether this is a just application of computer technology remains unclear.
Prism sounds an awful lot like Echelon. Taking call metadata from Verizon for all calls (indiscriminately, without probable cause) sounds like Carnivore on steroids.
In my view, simply saying that Congress has oversight and the FISA court approved the programs does not answer the question of whether our civil liberties are being eroded. Further, simply saying that a plot was thwarted does not answer that question either. Not only does "success" not answer the civil liberties question, the fact (?) that there was success does not answer the counterfactual question of whether appropriate police work conducted without wholesale collection of the personal information of people who are not suspects could have resulted in the same positive end.
The Patriot Act is, I believe, more dangerous to us and our democracy than terrorists. If we take away all the freedoms that are the soul of our country, there will be nothing to save from other threats. A wholly totalitarian state may be the least risky in terms of vulnerability to terrorist attack, but such a state would be the antithesis of what the US is supposed to be.
