Can a Focus on al Qaeda Yield Billions of Phone Records?
This morning USA Today revealed that the NSA has obtained, without warrants, billions of records indicating the telephone numbers called by “tens of millions of Americans.” This development significantly ups the ante on the intrusiveness of secret NSA surveillance. It seems to me at first glance that such a program likely violates several statutes enacted by Congress and prior Presidents (although of course the Administration may argue, as it does with other NSA programs, that the President may act under his Article II powers as commander-in-chief or the congressional resolution passed after the September 11th attacks). Orin Kerr provides a preliminary list of such statutes.
President Bush responded promptly to the story, stating:
The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates.
But if USA Today is correct about the number of records the NSA obtained it is difficult to discern any focus on persons with al Qaeda links. Perhaps the NSA gets billions of records but only analyzes some of them. If that is the explanation, then at the very least we have to wonder whether all the rest of the records will be destroyed rather than warehoused. As Ed Felten pointed out shortly before this new story broke, long-term storage of such intelligence raises a host of troubling issues.
From media blogger Ron Franscell at http://underthenews.blogspot.com …
The White House says “the intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.” Don’t get me wrong: I want to be protected from terrorist attacks and I think the government should do that. But I’m also old enough to remember the Vietnam logic that “we must destroy this village to save it,” so I don’t necessarily trust these guys to be great thinkers.
What happens when our “leaky” White House is looking at Hillary’s phone records and, oops, accidentally “leaks” that every Wednesday night she’s been calling an escort service in North Tonawonda? These guys don’t seem to be above using such information for the “greater good” of re-electing Republicans to protect Americans from terrorists.
If the NSA studies my phone records for the past year, they’ll find what I found in an exhaustive analysis: 1,845 calls to my son and daughter, in which I generally ask “how’s the weather?”; 1,045 phone calls to Allstate Insurance Co. to complain about the service after Hurricane Rita; 516 calls to my cell phone company to ask how to operate my cell phone; 511 to old friends in Colorado, in which I generally ask “how’s the weather?”; 435 to tech support at America Online; 20 to the pizza parlor up the street, always on an NFL game day; and six to my parents, in which I generally ask “how’s the weather?”
No bookies, no hookers, no sex lines, no fun. Really, my main concern is that somebody will check my phone calls and find that my life is terribly boring and I’m not really worth protecting from terrorists.
[...] Like Dan Solove, I thought I might offer some analysis of the NSA’s acquisition of domestic telephone records (see previous post here), but then discovered that very smart people had already written great posts. In particular, see Orin Kerr, Marty Lederman, and Kate Martin (a guest on the ACS Blog). So I shall defer. [...]
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