By Jane Mayer
Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from liberal Northern California and the
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, assured the
public earlier today that the government’s secret snooping into the
phone records of Americans was perfectly fine, because the information
it obtained was only “meta,” meaning it excluded the actual content of
the phone conversations, providing merely records, from a Verizon
subsidiary, of who called whom when and from where. In addition, she
said in a prepared statement, the “names of subscribers” were not
included automatically in the metadata (though the numbers, surely,
could be used to identify them). “Our courts have consistently
recognized that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this
type of metadata information and thus no search warrant is required to
obtain it,” she said, adding that “any subsequent effort to obtain the
content of an American’s communications would require a specific order
from the FISA court.”
She said she understands privacy—“that’s why this is carefully
done”—and noted that eleven special federal judges, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, had authorized
the vast intelligence collection. A White House official made the same
points to reporters, saying, “The order reprinted overnight does not
allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls” and was
subject to “a robust legal regime.” The gist of the defense was that, in
contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of
secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had
authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual
words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad
could it be?
The answer, according to the mathematician and
former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while
reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s worse than many might think.
“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about
so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She
explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary
information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can
track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the
content.”
For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone
calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers.
Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You
can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and
then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone
towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can
be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive
stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations,
like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the
sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news
agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion
of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s
unclear if any such brakes are applied.
Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political
information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting,
who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can
reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the
locations of cell phones at night.
For the law-enforcement community, particularly the parts focussed on locating terrorists, metadata has led to breakthroughs. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
the master planner of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and
Washington, “got picked up by his cell phone,” Landau said. Many other
criminal suspects have given themselves away through their metadata
trails. In fact, Landau told me, metadata and other new surveillance
tools have helped cut the average amount of time it takes the U.S.
Marshals to capture a fugitive from forty-two days to two.
But with each technological breakthrough comes a break-in to realms
previously thought private. “It’s really valuable for law enforcement,
but we have to update the wiretap laws,” Landau said.
It was exactly these concerns that motivated the mathematician
William Binney, a former N.S.A. official who spoke to me for the Drake
story, to retire rather than keep working for an agency he suspected had
begun to violate Americans’ fundamental privacy rights. After 9/11,
Binney told me, as I reported in the piece, General Michael Hayden, who
was then director of the N.S.A., “reassured everyone that the N.S.A.
didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was
getting every fish in the sea.”
Binney, who considered himself a conservative, feared that the
N.S.A.’s data-mining program was so extensive that it could help “create
an Orwellian state.”
As he told me at the time, wiretap surveillance requires trained
human operators, but data mining is an automated process, which means
that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, the government
could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or
organization you want to target,” he said. “It’s exactly what the
Founding Fathers never wanted.”
No comments:
Post a Comment