I will take my chances and trust the three branches of government
Making a Mountain Out of a Digital Molehill
By CHARLES A. SHANOR, NYT
ATLANTA — THE revelations this week that the federal government has been scooping up records of telephone calls inside the United States for seven years, and secretly collecting information from Internet companies on foreigners overseas for nearly six years, have elicited predictable outrage from liberals and civil libertarians.
Is the United States no better than those governed by repressive dictators who have no regard for individual rights? Could President Obama credibly raise human rights issues with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at a summit meeting on Friday, if America is running its own vast surveillance state? Has Mr. Obama, for all his talk of ending the “war on terror,” taken data mining to new levels unimagined by his predecessor, George W. Bush?
Hold it just a minute.
From what has been made public, we know that the F.B.I., under the Obama administration, used its powers under the Patriot Act to seek these records; that judges with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved these searches; and that members of Congress with oversight powers over the intelligence community were briefed about the searches. Some of them, like Senators Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, were uncomfortable with the scope of the data gathering and made their disapproval public, even though secrecy rules prohibited them from being more specific about their concerns, until now.
(More here.)
ATLANTA — THE revelations this week that the federal government has been scooping up records of telephone calls inside the United States for seven years, and secretly collecting information from Internet companies on foreigners overseas for nearly six years, have elicited predictable outrage from liberals and civil libertarians.
Is the United States no better than those governed by repressive dictators who have no regard for individual rights? Could President Obama credibly raise human rights issues with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at a summit meeting on Friday, if America is running its own vast surveillance state? Has Mr. Obama, for all his talk of ending the “war on terror,” taken data mining to new levels unimagined by his predecessor, George W. Bush?
Hold it just a minute.
From what has been made public, we know that the F.B.I., under the Obama administration, used its powers under the Patriot Act to seek these records; that judges with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved these searches; and that members of Congress with oversight powers over the intelligence community were briefed about the searches. Some of them, like Senators Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, were uncomfortable with the scope of the data gathering and made their disapproval public, even though secrecy rules prohibited them from being more specific about their concerns, until now.
(More here.)
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