Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The NSA’s Global Threat to Free Speech

By Kenneth Roth

The New York Review of Books - November 18, 2013

Following months of Snowden disclosures, the extent to which the National Security Agency’s extraordinary surveillance infringes on the privacy of our communications and other vast areas of our lives has become widely apparent. Far less appreciated, however, is the global threat that the NSA’s spying poses to freedom of expression over the Internet.
The NSA’s seemingly limitless prying into our personal electronic data is predicated on a cramped vision of our right to privacy. As I have described in this space these intrusions are facilitated by various shortcomings in current US law. For instance, the law recognizes a privacy interest in the contents of our communications, but not in what is known as our metadata, the electronic details about whom we communicate with, what we search for online, and where we go. The rationale, stated in a 1979 US Supreme Court ruling, is that we have no privacy interest in the phone numbers we dial because we share them with the phone company, even though the court could just as easily have ruled that the phone company has a fiduciary duty to respect the privacy of its customers.
In addition, on the weakest of legal authority, the NSA assumes that the mere collection of our communications does not invade our privacy until they are examined, or “queried.” Using facile metaphors about needing a haystack to find a needle, the NSA asserts that it is free to assemble that haystack unimpeded. It is as if the NSA were to mount video cameras in our bedrooms while assuring us that we have nothing to worry about until it looks at the film.

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