Ride the Lightning

Big Brother Revealed: All the Ways in Which the Government Watches Us

June 10, 2013

When the first revelations of June 6th came, I reminded myself not to post too quickly, that more information was sure to come out. Patience is my short suit, but I was glad I waited and appalled by all that we have learned over the past few days.

It appears that the government is monitoring us in any number of ways.

We found out on June 6th that Verizon had been providing virtually all communications traffic data, known as pen register/trap trace data, from its Verizon Business unit to the National Security Agency, pursuant to a top secret court order obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  The order directed Verizon to produce “on an ongoing daily basis…all call detail records…(i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

Not the content of the calls, but a record of all domestic and foreign calls.

Later on that date, we learned of a top secret program of the FBI and the NSA called PRISM that is apparently six years old. The nine companies named in security documents given to the Washington Post were Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Apparently, the government is storing video chats, e-mails, documents, VoIP phone calls, social media data, photographs, etc.

Terrorism has become a bogeyman whose existence seems to justify all manner of surveillance irrespective of the 4th Amendment. Now we have the FBI, part of the Justice Department, getting secret orders to conduct surveillance when the data is really going to the NSA, which is funded by the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies.

I heard one government spokesman on the news saying, "If you've got to find a needle in a haystack, you have to have the haystack first." A bit disingenuous.

As my friend Jody Westby noted in an impassioned post, "June 6, 2013 will go down as a watershed moment in American history: the day that Americans realized they have lost their privacy and Fourth Amendment protections to terrorism." Jody's post goes far beyond my own and is well worth reading.

She wrote a follow-up post as well noting that " President Obama has referred to himself as a “constitutional law professor,” but he seems to have lost the lesson. He has defended all of the recently revealed intelligence activities stating that Americans “can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” Both Jody and I are appalled that the 4th Amendment seems to have been reduced to an inconvenience.

Sure, a police state can catch terrorists more easily – but the price is too high – and Americans will never agree to pay it. Jody's suggestion is that an "Independent Counsel must be authorized and appointed to investigate surveillance programs, bring secret processes to scrutiny, and reset the balance of rights v. risk." I agree – and hope it is not too late.

You may recall that Benjamin Franklin was stopped outside of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and asked by a woman, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" He answered, "A republic, madam – if you can keep it." I hope we can.