The New York Times is running a story about yet another aspect of national surveillance in the War on Terror.
The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
Some thoughts:
- If this sort of monitoring is necessary to national security, but isn’t really legal, then pass a law to legalize it (including appropriate checks and balances), rather than just doing an end-run around the law.
- Data-mining isn’t evil in and of itself. Don’t lie about data collection, and (when appropriate given national security concerns) grant citizens the ability to see what’s been collected on themselves and the power to have errors corrected, and this can be bother a useful tool that doesn’t cause the U.S. to resemble a totalitarian state.
- See my earlier memo to the White House — lying to the American public is normally a bad thing, m’kay?
- This story doesn’t seem that shocking to me. I mean, isn’t this the sort of thing you’d expect the government to be doing? Is it me, or does the Times seem like it’s engaging in a bit of sensationalism, here?