A New America
TimeWatch Editorial
March 09, 2016
We will continue to take a look at the issue of privacy. There is a persistent debate regarding the right of investigative authorities to access the personal communications between individuals. The debate also includes the right of authorities to override or bypass encryption. What has been overlooked in the debate is whether or not non-investigative entities are allowed to continue the collection of this data. A careful examination of the rise and expanse of the technological commitment to this effort to amass the data will perhaps give a clearer perspective of the matter.
Danielle Kehl, Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus in July 2014, wrote a policy paper for the New America’s Open Technology Institute. On page four, they made the following statement.
“As Congress debated the reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act’s Section 215 in 2011, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) began a slow but steady drumbeat for reform by raising concerns about how the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly interpreting and using the law. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” he warned, “they will be stunned and they will be angry.”Over two years later, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian published the first leaked document by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Readers around the world were shocked to learn about what Senator Wyden had been referring to all along: for years, the NSA has been collecting nearly all of the phone records generated by major telephone companies such as Verizon on an ongoing, daily basis under Section 215’s authority—and has been using a secret, and now widely discredited, interpretation of the law to do it.” Danielle Kehl, Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
So what is this Patriot Act referred to in the above statement? The USA PATRIOT Act is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. Its title is a ten-letter acronym (U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T.) that stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001" The document itself is approximately 342 pages long. It was presented on October 24, 2001 exactly 43 days after 9/11. That alone should cause one to think. The structure of the document suggests that many of the pieces of its function would surely have been in existence prior to the catastrophic event that it was supposedly created in response to.
Patriot Act opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation , claim that the law has undone previous checks on civil liberty abuses, unnecessarily endangered privacy and discouraged free speech.
Among the Patriot Act's more controversial provisions is the ability to intercept Internet messages, included among the sections in Title II. Flowing out of the government's ability to legally tap telephone lines in certain cases, the USA Patriot Act permits the interception of all messages that are "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." Among its other surveillance-related authorizations, the act also allowed authorities to:
- Compel organizations to provide access to "any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
- Engage in so-called roving wiretaps, which allow surveillance on a target without specifying the device to be tapped.
This is just a part of the USA Patriot Act detail. 342 pages of specific instructive methodology, intended to carefully sift through every and all available information, in search of the “terrorist,” or, as is often promoted, the radicalized person who is planning a terrorist attack. If this is then truly the objective, then one single obstruction will never be allowed to stand in the way. Even though it has been said that this program has be shut down or for that matter rolled back, let us remember that the foundation has been solidly laid, the superstructure in already in place and the temptation remains. Who will know? Who can stop them?
Cameron A. Bowen
