Having missed it during its initial theater run, I finally got to see Citizen Four last night on HBO, the day after it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. It’s an exceptional film, both for its powerful subject matter and for its restrained style, and if the Oscar award drives more people to see it, that would be a good thing.

The subject is Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who revealed the NSA’s vast system of spying on American citizens. Snowden’s high security clearances gave him access to essentially everything that the NSA was [and is still] doing to collect and aggregate data from Americans’ [and others’] electronic communications. Even though much has been written about the NSA’s program since Snowden revealed it in 2013, I still got goose bumps while seeing it all again in Citizen Four.

Much has also been written about whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor. What we see in Citizen Four is neither of those: Snowden comes across as a highly intelligent and skilled person who, while doing his job as a systems administrator, began wondering about the constitutionality of the activities he was monitoring, and felt an ethical duty to reveal what was going on.

As he talks with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, Snowden is calm and rational. Clearly, he has thought carefully about what he is doing, why he’s doing it, and how best to get the information into the hands of reliable reporters, and out to the American public, whose rights are being violated.

Significantly, Snowden conveys all of his secretly obtained government documents to Greenwald [and others, for backup] in one huge data drop, rather than doling it out piecemeal. He helps Greenwald understand the structure of the documents, but makes no other comments. He has a specific rationale for sharing all of the information at once and with minimal commentary, he explains: He wants to avoid overlaying the documents with his own interpretations and prejudices.

Snowden also emphasizes that he does not want to be the story. He has been stealthy, of necessity, in obtaining and sharing sensitive NSA documents. But he does not want to remain anonymous for long, because he wants the focus to be on the revelations themselves, rather than on the spy-story search for his identity.

Not much happens, in the cinematic sense, in Citizen Four. Poitras creates an ominous tone, but does not sensationalize. She doesn’t have to: Snowden’s revelations themselves provide all the necessary shock value. And although the story itself has a lot of cloak-and-dagger, spy-novel characteristics, Poitras, to her credit, doesn’t overemphasize them. Much of the film focuses on the early conversations between Snowden and Greenwald, during which they figure out the ground rules for their interactions and strategize how Snowden’s information will be revealed through the press.

Poitras could have created a made-for-TV “America’s Most Wanted”-style show, but she didn’t. Instead, she has made a straightforward, as-it-happened documentary that reveals Edward Snowden’s intelligence, his sincerity, and his carefully thought-out plan to share information he sees as critical to the health of American democracy.

Nevertheless, there are some moments of high drama: The encrypted e-mail messages going back and forth between Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald; the paranoiac peak when a fire alarm suddenly blares in the Hong Kong hotel where Snowden is secretly meeting with Greenwald and Poitras; the notes passed between Greenwald and Snowden in Russia, where they fear eavesdropping. These things happened during filming, and they are part of the story.

Of course, this story does not end with the final credits. Today, Snowden is off the front pages, supplanted by the headline du jour. But we are all still wrestling with what he did, why he did it, and what it means in terms of our faith in our government and our sense of safety, privacy and freedom. In Citizen Four, Snowden expresses the wish that, once he has faded from the headlines—whether living in Russia, as he is currently, or possibly in jail, an outcome many hope for—others with similar concerns and information will come forward. I can only hope that, in the interest of democracy, his wish is fulfilled.

The post Citizen Four: The Oscars got this one right appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In his book, The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney describes how there are certain types of issues in which Democrats mimic the illogical positions of most Republicans. He cites examples such as the Keystone Pipeline and fracking for natural gas. Both of these involve considerable data analysis. Sometimes Democrats distance themselves from the data because it is so complicated. Thereupon, they let their emotions guide their views, and in these cases like Keystone and fracking, they tend to favor what is perceived as preserving the environment.

It’s possible that another one of these issues is the NSA data collection, which was brought to our attention by Edward Snowden. The legality of what he did may never be determined, because to date he has not come back to the United States. The morality of what he did is certainly up for discussion.

But support for the legality of what the NSA is doing, as opposed to what Snowden did, got a boost on Friday, December 27, 2013. As CNN reported:

(CNN) — The National Security Agency notched a much-needed win in court, after a series of setbacks over the legality and even the usefulness of its massive data collection program.

A federal judge in New York ruled Friday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of data on nearly every phone call made in the United States is legal.

The ruling contrasts with another ruling last week by a federal judge in Washington, who called the same program “almost Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional.

I certainly don’t envy the judges who have rendered these decisions, as well as those on the Supreme Court who will ultimately decide the constitutionality (or their political preferences) regarding data that the NSA collects, and what the NSA does with it.

Progressives have generally lined up with the ACLU in wanting to curtail the extent of the data collection by the NSA. The arguments in favor of their position are both considerable and valid. The primary one is the right to privacy. While the word privacy does not occur even once in the Constitution, courts have historically recognized it as a legitimate right. Virtually all judgments in favor of privacy are based on the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is not much of a stretch to extrapolate from here that electronic eavesdropping should require a warrant based on probable cause that some illegality was occurring. The right to privacy is not a luxury for a special class of people; it is a fundamental right for all of us.

We are left with the ongoing dilemma of what is more important: the right to privacy or the right to security. Neither is absolute, so we’re left to find a consensus between the two. It is presumptuous for any of us to say that we know with certainty where that line should be drawn.

I am certainly glad that Snowden provided us with a much more clear knowledge of what the NSA is actually doing. I’m also glad that a set of judges, rather than Congress, is going to set some guidelines as to how far the NSA can go. When they rule, it will not be the end of the discussion, but at least we’ll have rules that are much more reasonable than in the pre-Snowden era. Numerous questions will still remain, but hopefully we’ll be better prepared to try to answer them.

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Edward Snowden is back in the news with a story that the government may be considering offering him amnesty in exchange for return of the remaining estimated 1.5 million classified NSA documents in his possession. In the months since Snowden first leaked documents to the press, I’ve found myself engaged in conversations discussing issues I usually don’t talk about with friends and family—issues like privacy, security, and the fundamental relationship between the individual and government.

Those conversations often begin with questions of how concerned each of us should be about government intrusion into our emails, cell-phone records, and private lives as law-abiding citizens who pose no threat to the state or to our neighbors.  Those conversations often grapple as well with the future: how technological innovation could intrude ever more deeply into our privacy and whether history will judge Edward Snowden as hero or traitor for revealing the abuses and dangers inherent in new technologies.

What intrigues me most in those conversations is the hero/traitor discussion. The more I think about it, the less important figuring out how to label Mr. Snowden becomes. I realize two things: first, that the fact that Mr. Snowden sparked a national debate about privacy and security is reason enough to thank him. And second, that Snowden, and how we think about him and others who put themselves at risk to bring to our attention abuse and misuse of power, should encourage us to look more closely at our beliefs and assumptions about heroism.

When thinking about this, it’s inevitable that there are more questions than answers. Questions like who is a hero? What acts rise to the heroic? What is the relationship between heroism and the situation out of which it arises? Can acts of heroism be heroic in what they achieve but traitorous in the means employed? Is it ethical or unethical to exploit the idea of heroism to achieve certain outcomes?

Let’s look at what the dictionary tells us about heroes and heroism. The definition includes courage in the face of danger and actions that put the hero in danger or risk of bodily or other harm.

The definition couldn’t be clearer.  But clarity on paper is one thing. Real life is quite another. What are our commonly held concepts of heroism beyond the page? Without question, we recognize the heroic when the act of heroism is physical: firefighters and cops rushing into a burning building or climbing the stairs of a doomed skyscraper. Spectators rushing to aid victims of a bombing when it’s unclear if there are more explosions to come.  Good Samaritans jumping into raging floodwaters to save strangers caught in the deluge or jumping down next to electrified subway tracks to pull a person to safety and away from an oncoming train. Teachers shielding the bodies of their young charges from a madman’s bullets.

In these situations we rarely discuss or question the heroes’ motives beyond the impulse to aid, to give comfort, to save a life. We focus solely on the outcome of the hero’s act.  But ambiguity rears its head when the hero acts to achieve an outcome that is more abstract—as Snowden did—like protecting privacy or exposing the abuse of power.

Even in combat heroism is not without its ambiguities.  We label unreservedly as heroes those who are physically damaged. Their wounds—the missing limbs, disfigured faces, charred skin, scars from bullet holes—are worn like garments that become the physical manifestation of their heroic acts. Unfortunately, those who are psychologically damaged in combat do not fare as well.

Once upon a time the bar was set so high for the heroic that few could reach it. To be a hero was to be truly extraordinary.  It meant taking risks and actions almost beyond imagination. Today the jingoistic language of our elected officials—from commander-in-chief on down—commonly equates the choice to become an armed combatant with heroism itself.

The concept of heroism has been altered even more radically since the advent of all-day, all-night, all-media, everywhere-you-look-listen-or-read marketing. The shift is perceptual and semantic in nature. The hero and the heroic have been stretched and twisted into nearly unrecognizable shapes to fit into a package of marketing tools. Word devaluation is the most accurate way to describe what’s happened.  Just look at how the word is casually thrown around.  Television recruitment ads for the armed forces sell the promise of heroism for all. Bumper stickers extol those in uniform as “our heroes.”

It’s beyond question that young men and women who choose to devote a time of out of their lives and risk their health and lives for us deserve our admiration and gratitude.  But to label every one of them as heroes, regardless of their duties and the way in which they carry out those duties, is to diminish the heroism of the true hero. What we have today is hero-lite.

Something more insidious is going on as well. Call it spin or propaganda, whichever you choose. But heroism is not just about the person and the act. Calling something heroic bestows upon the act the seal of approval and justification.  We assume that if an act is labeled heroic then the cause for which the act was taken must also be just.   If every soldier, sailor, and pilot is a hero then the fight itself must necessarily be just.

No commander nor politician will ever admit that the lives of Americans lost in service to their country were sacrificed for naught. To admit that is to break a solemn trust with the families of those who have died. It is to admit as a society that we asked those men and women to defend us in a false cause. If the men and women of our military are all heroes, as our politicians and the advertising world tell us, then how can we question the justness of the wars they are engaged in? These brave individuals cannot be heroes for nothing. And so goes the self-reinforcing circle of logic.

But let’s return to Edward Snowden. It’s revealing that a majority of Americans recognize the ambiguities in judging Snowden’s actions.  In one poll, 46 percent said they didn’t know if Snowden should be called a traitor or a patriot. In another, 23 percent labeled Snowden a traitor, and 31 percent labeled him a patriot.

And what about Snowden himself? After fleeing the U.S., Snowden granted an interview to the South China Morning Post in which he articulated his view of the path he’s followed. Snowden chose his words carefully: “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.”

After much thought, I understand exactly what he means.

The post NSA leaker Snowden and the debatable definition of “heroism” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Alfred McCoy over at TomDispatch.com has taken the time to provide us with a brief, sordid history of the U.S. surveillance state and proven, to me at least, that there is still much to learn about where we are and how we got here. I was surprised, for example, to discover that the path to an Orwellian future began in the late 19th century with our presence in the Philippines.

McCoy writes (and elaborates later in the piece):

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.  A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

Perhaps the most damaging [domestically speaking] interference via illegal government surveillance took place during the civil rights movement and amidst heavy war opposition.

In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee branded them a “sophisticated vigilante operation” that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.” Significantly, even this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.

After New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement, discovering a database with 300,000 names.  These investigations also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to reform.

To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court to approve all national security wiretaps.  In a bitter irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

It’s not all bleak. It turns out that Republicans of the early 20th century were actually a force of opposition to government sponsored violations of privacy.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.

The two leading parties have, at times, agreed that unchecked government surveillance is a danger to all and took steps to prevent the massive levels of information gathering that we have today. For all the good it did, right? Unfortunately, public consent is a pretty large part of this history lesson. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have participated (and still do), perhaps misguidedly, in the surveilling of anti-war protesters, dissidents, and suspected terrorists. In the 20th century, remember, it was suspected communists and/or spies.

Just one example, as follows:

After the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.

In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.

This brief history is at turns horrifying and breathtaking. It seems to me the missing ingredient is a massive popular uprising against such illegal violations of our amendment and human rights. Much of what we have seen these past decades is apathy, as Mark Twain predicted.

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America.  In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because  “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”

It’s true, sadly. Under President Obama, we have seen an unprecedented and largely unopposed prosecution of whistleblowers using the Espionage Act. There have been seven prosecutions thus far under Obama, preceded by only three since the law’s 1917 origins. As Linda Greene wrote back in 2011, proving once again the utter disconnect between what the president says to us and what he and those he appointed actually do:

When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled,” ABC News’ Megan Chuchmach and Rhonda Schwartz reported on Aug. 4, 2009.

Regrettably, Campaign Obama is not around to protect the likes of Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning from either the media persecution or from government prosecution. It is difficult for an uniformed public to protest something they are unaware of, such as the NSA’s PRISM program. But it seems to me that when we allow the imprisonment and prosecution of those whistleblowers who seek to inform and empower us, we are granting the government permission to carry on with illegal acts of surveillance against us.

The people’s unspoken permission also sets the stage for our own possible imprisonment. When everything you say or do is subject to secret recordings and filed away in vast government-owned digital storage facilities, anything you have said or done can be used against you by a government with a history of “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

At the very least, the mere possibility of such is an effective tool of suppression and submission, perhaps most starkly proven by how easy it was for the NSA to obtain near-total corporate complicity in illegal information gathering. And as McCoy’s history lesson teaches us, this is not just an American fear. U.S. surveillance is of global concern; it is a much-used weapon in our war chest, as it is with some foreign governments.

Perhaps it is time to learn from our history, both distant and recent past, and act upon what we learn…in large, unimpeachable bipartisan numbers.

The post A brief history of the U.S. surveillance state appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’m trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings about the recently revealed NSA data dragnet, in which millions of Americans’ phone and internet records are being monitored and saved in a huge data-storage facility. One thing that disturbs me is that, in a recent poll, a majority of respondents didn’t think the whole thing was a big deal. The thinking goes, apparently, that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about when the government traces your phone records, email correspondence, Google searches and the like.

To that line of thinking, I must say: Tell that to the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the Tutsis, the Native Americans, the Armenians, the African-Americans,  and all of the other minorities who, throughout history, have been rounded up, jailed, persecuted and even killed–not for doing anything wrong, but simply for being who they were.

It seems to me that, throughout history, “doing something wrong” has often been a matter of definition. It was “wrong” to be  Jew in Germany and Poland in the 1930s and 1940s. Or to help a Jew escape.  It was “wrong” to be  Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1990s. It was “wrong” to be a black person in America’s South, and in many northern cities, it’s still “wrong” to drive while being black. It was “wrong” to be a Native American in the 1880s, when white people wanted the land.

No, I don’t think we’re living in a neo-Nazi America, and I don’t think President Obama or the NSA are planning anything like those horrors. But you can’t deny history. Injustices occur regularly. And having this gigantic database of information about American citizens strikes me as a way to enable nefarious actors to do bad things–even to people who aren’t doing anything wrong. It might not happen next week, or even next year. But it’s just too frightening to imagine how that ever-growing mountain of information in a data-storage facility in Utah might be used someday in the future, when “doing something wrong” is redefined yet again.

The post NSA data-mining: Not doing anything wrong doesn’t protect you appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The revelation that the federal government has been secretly gathering records on the phone calls and online activities of millions of Americans and foreigners seems not to have alarmed most Americans. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center over the four days immediately after the news first broke found that just 41 percent of Americans deemed it unacceptable that the Security Agency “has been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.”

So writes James B. Rule in an op-ed in the New York Times.

One can extrapolate from the 41 percent in the poll that Americans are essentially split over the issue of the NSA’s collection of data from telephone and internet records. Perhaps this is a good time for a public issue to be settled by the courts. It certainly seems as if it will be, as the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) will be challenging the NSA (National Security Agency) and/or whoever is most responsible for the data-mining decision.

President Obama has said that he supports the work of the NSA, and his actions have certainly affirmed that support. In light of Edward Snowden’s leaking of the existence and extent of the program, he may well want to trim his sails and take a position more in support of preserving human rights. This is clearly a tough issue for President Obama, and for many Americans. The president is not unfamiliar with how to acknowledge his reluctance to take a definitive decision on a difficult issue. During his 2008 campaign, he was asked at what point a baby gets “human rights.”  While supporting a woman’s right to choose, he said that an answer to that question was “above his pay grade.” Some will say that he was punting on the issue, but others will agree with him that the question is too difficult for any human being to answer, and that to try to do so is foolish.

So it is with the current issue involving “dueling rights” of security and privacy. Like many on the left, I am queasy about this kind of collection of data by the federal government. On the other hand, if it is true that dozens of plots have been foiled by NSA data-mining, then I would be more willing to forfeit some privacy. The person who probably has the best bird’s-eye view of the situation is the President. While I trust him to make sound macro-decisions, I shudder at the thought of another Richard Nixon or George W. Bush being in a position to set broad policy for the NSA and related agencies. My one wish, as the dialogue continues on the issue, is that all participants step back from the vice of certainty. It’s really important to listen to opposing points of view.

The post NSA vs. ACLU: Split Decision appeared first on Occasional Planet.

If you’re like me, you haven’t quite figured out what to think about the revelation that the National Security Administration has been amassing a huge database of our phone and internet contacts for more than seven years. Of course, it sounds bad. Really bad. Orwell bad. I’m even afraid that I share some concerns with people on the right—and that’s frightening. But before I knee-jerk react and espouse uninformed opinions, I’d like to hear the answers to some big questions about the program known as Prism. So, I was glad to see that one of my favorite news sources—ProPublica—is asking precisely the big  questions that need answering. Here’s ProPublica’s list, with some of the answers—and further questions—they’ve found so far. Bottom line: We don’t know very much about any of it, and so far, nobody’s talking.

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long?

It’s not entirely clear.

According to The Guardian, there’s a court order directing a Verizon subsidiary to turn over phone “metadata” for a three-month period. There’s also evidence that the program covers AT&T and Sprint.

How long has the dragnet has existed? At least seven years, and maybe going back to 2001.

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act?

That’s classified.

The Verizon court order relies on Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That provision allows the FBI to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a secret order requiring companies, like Verizon, to produce records – “any tangible things” – as part of a “foreign intelligence” or terrorism investigation. As with any law, exactly what the wording means is a matter for courts to decide. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of Section 215 is secret.

…it appears that the court is allowing a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act. But we still don’t know the specifics.

Has the NSA’s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks?

It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified.

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through Prism?

It’s not clear.

Intelligence director Clapper said in his declassified description that the government can’t get information using Prism unless there is an “appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

One thing we don’t know is how the government determines who is a “foreign target.” The Washington Post reported that NSA analysts use “search terms” to try to achieve “51 percent confidence” in a target’s “foreignness.” How do they do that? Unclear.

We’ve also never seen a court order related to Prism — they are secret — so we don’t know how broad they are. The Post reported that the court orders can be sweeping, and apply for up to a year. Though Google has maintained it has not “received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.”

So, how does Prism work?

In his statement Saturday, Clapper described Prism as a computer system that allows the government to collect “foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

That much seems clear. But the exact role of the tech companies is still murky.

Relying on a leaked PowerPoint presentation, the Washington Post originally described Prism as an FBI and NSA program to tap “directly into the central servers” of nine tech companies including Google and Facebook. Some of the companies denied giving the government “direct access” to their servers. In a later story, published Saturday, the newspaper cited unnamed intelligence sources saying that the description from the PowerPoint was technically inaccurate.

The Post quotes a classified NSA report saying that Prism allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” not the company servers themselves. So what does any of that mean? We don’t know.

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The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together:
“We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” —James Bamford, Wired 

James Bamford, reporting in Wired, tells us how far the National Security Agency (NSA) has progressed in its domestic spying and what it’s planning for us in the future. His article, “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)” is an amazing read. The geek in me is fascinated by the technology, but, it left me with a sick feeling. I learned that the U.S. government is monitoring and storing my entire digital footprint—emails, phone calls, parking tickets, Google searches, travel records, library records, bank statements, online purchases and credit cards.

You may think that government surveillance activity is directed solely at suspected terrorists and criminals, but, you would be wrong. It is directed at all of us. The U.S. government is engaged in gathering massive amounts of personal and sensitive information about ordinary citizens, with little or no oversight by the courts, Congress or the public.

According to the ACLU, agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) use computer programs to link people and make predictions about their behavior. They build “communities of interest” by constructing maps of our associations and activities. This is how we can end up on bloated and inaccurate watch lists that can keep us from flying on commercial airlines, or renewing our passports. This data stays indefinitely in government databases.

The NSA and its history of warrantless surveillance

For years the NSA ignored the courts and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and secretly and illegally eavesdropped on U.S. citizens. In late 2005, The New York Times revealed the NSA was engaged in warrantless wiretapping. In January, 2007, the NSA temporarily discontinued the practice in response to groups and individuals filing lawsuits against telecommunications companies and the Bush administration claiming that they had illegally monitored their phone calls or e-mails. Whistleblower’s provided evidence that AT&T was complicit in the NSA’s warrantless surveillance, which involved the private communications of millions of Americans. You may recall the discovery, in 2006, of the famous “room” at AT&T where the NSA tapped into those calls.

After the NSA program was exposed, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), which made the practice of domestic spying legal. It was sold to the public as an important tool in “the war against terrorism.” The FAA granted telecoms immunity from prosecution and lawsuits.

What Bamford’s article reveals is the enormous growth of domestic spying since 2008. He reports that the NSA has established official “listening posts” throughout the nation—anywhere from 10 to 20 large, windowless buildings knows as switches—to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls. The listening posts allow government access to international communications and most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US.

The Utah Data Center

The main focus of Bamford’s article, however, is the Utah Data Center—a government facility under construction in a Bluffdale Utah. It’s being built to monitor and store . . . everything. The following passages are from his article. Emphasis is mine:

The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter . . . ”

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to “cryptanalyze,” or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.” . . .

 Section 215 of the Patriot Act

The NSA and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies use the infamous Section 215 of the Patriot Act to “authorize” their warrantless domestic spying activities on ordinary citizens. The ACLU has been trying to use FOIA requests to find out how the government is interpreting Section 215, but have not been successful in their efforts.

The government has just officially confirmed what we’ve long suspected: there are secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over “any tangible things.” Just exactly what the government thinks that phrase means remains to be seen, but there are indications that their take on it is very broad.

What is most problematic is that the government has secret Justice Department opinions about our laws that are not available for public scrutiny. In a democracy we should know how the Justice Department and the current administration is interpreting the laws our representatives pass.

So, let’s recap

The NSA, under the past and current administrations, has a history of intrusive behavior that has gotten worse in the past decade. In just over one year, virtually anything you communicate through any traceable medium, and any digital record of your activities—which these days is everything—will unofficially be property of the US government to use as it sees fit.

You may argue that the NSA is just trying to do its job. Now imagine a president Romney, or a president Santorum having control of your information. Think back to Watergate and the desire of a sitting president to use information against his political enemies. Consider the McCarthy era and the persecution of anyone who had progressive, socialist or communist leanings. Or, better yet, ponder the consolidation of power and money in the last decades, and the corruption of our political system. Think of a handful of billionaires, who have funded the election of a friendly government, gaining access to NSA data for their own purposes. And then consider what is going on right now—the coordinated government attacks on the Occupy movement.

In May of last year, The New York Times reported that Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall are questioning the administration’s interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Mr. Wyden said. . .

Another member of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, backed Mr. Wyden’s account, saying, “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.”

The NSA is supposed to be using intelligence data to keep the citizens of the United States safe. However, its invasive use of advanced surveillance technology to spy on ordinary citizens is eroding our privacy and right to free speech and assembly.  Add to that, when any government, or part of government, operates behind a curtain of secrecy with ineffective oversight, it is an invitation to corruption and abuse of power. The good news is that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 sunsets in December of 2012.  It’s time to have a national debate on privacy and government surveillance before Big Brother becomes permanent.

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