I am neither a pinko nor a
Luddite. I tend to not get involved in long screeds. I have been seeking a succinct statement of my concerns, and came across this:
The quote is from Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324188604578543721259199626.html
I would think Noonan needs to go and read the laws that govern how the NSA and other intelligence agencies conduct their business. There are laws in place that explicitly state what can and cannot be done and under what circumstances. It's in writing for anyone who looks up the FISA and FAAs can read. What the NSA does and does do is explained, on their website and in other sources, to the extent possible. If Noonan is advocating declassifying everything the government does and putting it out for the public to see, that is a task that is not doable and defeats the purpose of the government doing those things anyway. When you are going after an adversary, whether it be terrorists, hostile foreign governments, rogue enemy individuals, etc., you have to do it in a way that allows you to do so without allowing them to stay one step ahead. Would people agree with the idea that the military should broadcast its battle plans to everyone in the US to gain approval and have a spirited debate before carrying them out? I would hope the answer would be no from a logical individual. The same holds even more true for intelligence gathering, where you have to operate out of the public view in order to gather the knowledge needed. You can bet that states like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and a whole list of others conduct these operations daily without a peep to the world community, or even their populations, because they understand that the efficacy of such programs depend on doing them in silence. What people don't seem to get is that secrecy doesn't equate to nefarious. Just because people are scared of what they don't know, doesn't mean what they don't know is abridging their rights or making them less of a free people.
The Snowden revelations followed quickly upon my expressed concerns about the
advances in biometrics.
At this point the only "truth" - pertinent to me - appears to be coming from the Snowden revelations. While the government says that for national security reasons it cannot be more forthcoming, in my mind the government has an obligation to do so.
The debate has yet to be had.
I would say your concerns about biometrics, while partially legitimate, are not necessarily germane to this argument. If you make advances to prevent identification of a person by biometrics (especially things such as gait identification), then you get into the slippery slope of eliminating things like eye witnesses and put into a domain consider to be protected under privacy a whole host of identification features that have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
However, as far as truth in this case goes, I don't believe Snowden has met the burden of such yet.
1) He released a PowerPoint (which we've only seen 4 of 41 pages of) that indicates there is a program that allows the NSA to obtain a particular set of data from US service providers. I don't think anyone is arguing that fact, and there is partial evidence to back that up. However, what wasn't provided was any evidence that it has been used to target Americans. Snowden claims the NSA stores all of this and he could access it, given his accesses, on anyone in the US, yet he provided no proof of this. The service providers claim they can provide data when NSA comes to them with a valid court order. So in the use of this program, there is no evidence to support either side, so you can't derive any truth from either of those. Both parties, Snowden because he is an admitted Libertarian leaning person who admitted to taking the job with Booz Allen to get information on the programs to use, and the service providers who could stand to lose a lot of trust and business because of this program, have plenty of motivation to direct the conversation and push their version of the story.
2) He released a Verizon warrant showing the delivery of bulk metadata to the NSA. There is no one denying this. However, the data delivered (originating phone number, destination phone number, and length of call) have been ruled in the past as not covered under the Fourth Amendment (Smith vs. Maryland) and was codified into law with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Thus, the fact that the government had a warrant granting them this collection (which incidentally, if you look at the warrant is only a Secondary Order) and the fact that they were collecting non-protected data indicates that no wrongdoing at all occurred. The reason the program was kept secret is because announcing to the world you're using metadata, with the appropriate warrants, to find who terrorists called from overseas in the US, compromises your ability to find and track terrorists and their activities in the US.
The burden of proof is still on Snowden to support his claims that the government collects all of this PRISM data and can easily access it whenever. Even he himself has not accused anyone of actually breaking the law and using this technology to spy on Americans. I'm not so sure why everyone else has jumped on the hyped up media spin that somehow existence of these programs automatically means that they are being used against Americans.
