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This is structurally brilliant. All of those complaining about hypocrisy or partisanship are missing the point. Ignore the specific issue. The critical questio
by DanielBMarkham 13y ago
This is structurally brilliant. All of those complaining about hypocrisy or partisanship are missing the point.
Ignore the specific issue. The critical question this raises is this: if, as the administration says, the NSA needs all this data to find terrorists, who gets to say what it's used for or not? Ignore the entire privacy argument. If the executive branch is keeping records on all of this stuff, is it also claiming unique and sole access to it?
Because if they are, anybody with a brain can see the problem. In fact, the partisanship of the Congressman spells it out in clear relief. Just picture that guy as the next president. If you give that much power to the executive and they alone make the decision how to use it, then by definition such information will be used for political purposes. Who gets to decide what is so evil that requires this special, and extra-constitutional, treatment? Everybody doesn't want terrorists, but how about supporting congressional investigations? Helping wrongly-accused people get out of jail? Divorce proceedings? Civil cases?
Are we going to have a system of law and order where certain evidence is presented or not solely depending on the decisions of the executive branch?
What this shows is that this NSA data thing just isn't bad, it's bad on multiple levels. It completely breaks the way our constitutional government is supposed to operate. Even if somehow the political weasels in DC get away with keeping the lid on it, the criminal and Congressional cases alone are going to cause a nightmare. Can you imagine how Congress is going to act if some pet cause of theirs could have been supported by evidence NSA refused to release? How criminal defendants are going to react if, years later, they learn that the government was holding exculpatory information?
And it's just going to go on, and on, until they finally open it all up. Then there'll be a hell-storm.
ADD: And I'm willing to bet 20 bucks that part of the data NSA is collecting is the location tracking information from our cellphones. (accurate to within 50 meters). Can you imagine the number of places in the rest of government operations where such information would be useful?
- hindsightbias 13y ago> location tracking information from our cellphones. Here's what a smart congressperson would ask: "Director Clapper, on April 15th, 2009, there were large protests around the country. Did your agency request cellular meta data covering that day?" It's likely obfiscated by the telco as I understand it, but imagine that freakout. We could pull our batteries out in 2003, but we don't have that feature anymore.
- discostrings 13y ago>We could pull our batteries out in 2003, but we don't have that feature anymore. Many of us still do. Some of us still greatly prefer phones with a removable battery--I wouldn't buy a phone without one. Goodbye HTC, hello Samsung.
- CamperBob2 13y agoYour phone doesn't emit any signals at all when turned off. If it did, people from the FAA to every geek with a spectrum analyzer at work would be screaming bloody murder.
- beambot 13y agoCan the phone be made to receive while "powered off" -- even sporadically? They wouldn't want to tip their hand re:transmission capabilities. They'd probably only activate the capability on-demand, and only for high-value targets (ie. by sending a special packet to be received by the "powered off" handset). It's sorta like turning your phone into a listening "bug" while powered on... you wouldn't want to constantly stream data and tip your hand -- you'd only activate the capability when there is a strong likelihood of a valuable conversation occurring.
- CamperBob2 13y agoNo, not undetectably. Someone would notice, trust me.
- thezilch 13y agoNah, we'd have seen statistically more plane crashes. /s
- marshray 13y agoIt probably wouldn't take noticeable power to run voice-activated microphone audio compression and storage. Then the recorded audio could be transmitted later when the battery was back in.
- cpleppert 13y ago>>Are we going to have a system of law and order where certain evidence is presented or not solely depending on the decisions of the executive branch? No, in the absence of a FISA order the information cannot be released. This isn't a legel dilemma at the moment(ethically certainly). There are almost certainly implied constitutional protections on the use of the data. The only interesting exception would be if someone decided to waive their protections and petitioned the courts to grant access to their phone records. The courts may allow this as no constitutional rights would be violated and no else would have an interest in preventing this(except the Government possibly).
- bane 13y agoprediction: the collection won't stop, NSA will simply become an even better funded service bureau to provide evidence and information "for official use only", for random court cases etc...thus paving it's way for this kind of collection to become broadly socially acceptable
- visarga 13y agoThis works both ways. The people in power are being tracked, too, and if not, then it's another scandal.
- rooshdi 13y agoBingo. If our government went to war over supposed weapons of mass destruction, how can we trust them with weapons of mass surveillance?