The government can keep us safe from terrorism without
stifling free speech, invading everyone's privacy, and seizing our data.
By Timothy Karr
Whether you think
spying is OK or not depends on your relationship to the information being
collected.
If you’re on the
gathering end, the invasion of someone else’s privacy doesn’t seem like a big
deal. But if you’re the one whose private life is being pried into, this kind
of surveillance seems like a very big deal indeed.
This dynamic is at
work with the unfolding story about National Security Agency programs that
vacuum up the telephone and Internet data of millions of people.
Maybe they spoke too
soon. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are responding in anger and demanding an end to Washington’s widespread
surveillance.
This is why
protections like the First and Fourth Amendments were enshrined in our
Constitution in the first place — to shield people from such abuses of power.
But Americans aren’t
being protected right now — because the people signing off on the laws are on
the receiving side of the information divide. Many of them have lost touch with
the privacy needs of the people they’re sworn to serve. To those in power, the
intrusion into our lives is a tiny price to pay for a full-field view of the
communications of all Americans.
And the range of data
being mined is pretty staggering. According to reports in the Guardian and The
Washington Post, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video,
photographs, emails, documents, and phone-connection “metadata” that allow
authorities to track any person’s movements and contacts over time.
This information
includes data about people both abroad and at home who haven’t committed any
crimes and have no connections with terrorist groups.
The Obama
administration’s supposed authority to spy on all of us stems from its loose
interpretation of the controversial USA PATRIOT Act and the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Section 215 of the
PATRIOT Act lets the government obtain a secret court order to collect
“tangible things” that could be relevant to an investigation from businesses
that hold user records. This vague wording has freed up intelligence officers
to go after nearly any piece of information from anyone, including our
Internet-search data, website-browsing patterns, telephone-contact lists, and
even Facebook “likes.”
Section 215 does an
official dance around the Fourth Amendment — which protects Americans from the
warrantless search and seizure of property — by dispensing with the
government’s burden of establishing probable cause before obtaining a search
warrant. And FISA, which was reauthorized in 2012 under the FISA Amendments
Act, allows the government to monitor the contents of foreign communications
traffic — without showing that any particular individual is actually suspected
of criminal conduct.
The resulting dragnet
also threatens our First Amendment rights. People will be less likely to
express themselves on popular services offered by Facebook, Google, and Yahoo
if they know these companies are cooperating with government-surveillance
schemes.
A coalition of
privacy, Internet freedom, and free speech advocates has launched
a nationwide campaign to stop the spying and clarify the laws that are supposed
to keep our private lives private. The coalition has also called on Congress to
launch a special investigation that would reveal the full extent of the NSA’s
spying program.
While keeping
Americans safe from terrorism is a noble objective, it can be accomplished
without stifling free speech, invading everyone’s privacy, and seizing our
data. We shouldn’t have to choose between security and our constitutional
rights.
Timothy Karr is the
senior director of strategy for Free Press. FreePress.net.
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)