The NSA's spying is a Bush-era program that runs roughshod over our civil liberties. Obama needs to stand up for US and stop defending his predecessor's programs.
Edward Snowden’s heroic revelations about the NSA’s spying sent a shudder through the military-spying complex. Many, on both the left and the right, have stood up to oppose the NSA’s violations of the 4th Amendment. Why isn’t President Obama among them?
The program captures Americans’ emails, takes in our metadata (who we talk to, from where, for how long), and even illegally obtains evidence against US citizens. It is a holdover from the Bush administration that needs to be dismantled.
And the NSA doesn’t just target terrorists.
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA-related links, defenders of the program are claiming that the program’s narrowly tailored and only targets terrorists and associates. For instance, Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post describedthe NSA’s surveillance as putting together a “field of dots”, where each dot represents a person. “If you are not communicating with (a) terrorist”, he writes, “your dot is not touched”. This same claim has been repeated a dozen times by different defenders of the program.
But statements like these are only true if you’re willing to radically redefine “communicating with”. Testifying to Congress, National Security Agency Deputy Director Chris Inglis discussedhow the NSA might use a “three-hop” query to decide who to investigate. What this means is that the NSA can examine people who communicate with the terrorists (one hop) and then everyone who communicates with that person (two hops) and then everyone who communicates with anyone in that second circle (three hops).
Here’s how that might play out in the real world. Let’s say your buddy’s a journalist who interviews—not a terrorist—but the friends and family of a dead terrorist (as the New York Times did when they ran a story on Samir Khan). That right there is two hops. So they’ll automatically investigate your buddy’s data, even though he didn’t actually talk to a terrorist. But because the NSA uses a three-hop system, they would then examine your data, as well as that of anyone else your buddy happened to call, email, or IM.
But let’s take this farther. Let’s say that your buddy happened to actually interview a suspected terrorist. That’s one hop. You’re the second hop, along with everyone else your buddy spoke to. The third hop is all of your friends and family, and the friends and family of everyone else who ever spoke to your buddy.
Washington’s Blog lays out the math: “If the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist”.
This is like that old game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”: it’s “Three Degrees of NSA”. Only, if you win, you get to have your phone calls (and emails, and Facebook chats) monitored by the government. Is the NSA’s dragnet spying a program we want to live under?
President Obama ran an amazing campaign in 2009. He was more progressive than Kerry or Clinton or even Gore back in 2000. He railed against the Patriot Act and the sort of dragnet spying that the NSA regularly practices.
I still praise him for a lot of what he’s done. What I cannot understand is why he is defending a Bush-era program that violates our civil liberties. For Gods’ sake, even many Republicans are attacking the NSA. Representative Justin Amash (R—MI) spearheaded an effort to defund part of the NSA. It’s time for Obama to join him.
Obama needs to stand up for the people who elected him. Not defend Bush-era spying programs.