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.
To read more....
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