This, as with most of Greenwald's work on this subject, has been a slow effort to educate people about a very technical (for the average person) topic. Building on previous reports that showed the type of activity and the threat it can cause, this installment is about establishing the pattern of illegality.
If the NSA could justify the time and expense to make a search tool, there must be a lot of searching needs... which aren't legal for the NSA to send to the domestic-oriented agencies.
Also, more explicitly-stated details about how powerful "metadata" can be. Obvious to anybody who understands INNER JOIN, but this is still new for most people.
//Of course, I'm sure all this ignoring of warrants and the 4th Amendment, to quote a DOJ lawyer in the recent EFF mess regarding Jewel v NSA, is all for the "national security of this company". (emphasis mine)
Also, more explicitly-stated details about how powerful "metadata" can be. Obvious to anybody who understands INNER JOIN, but this is still new for most people.
The power of metadata is implicit. No one at NSA is arguing that metadata isn't powerful, that's the whole reason they're collecting it.
What the NSA is arguing is against the meme that they're trodding roughshod over the Constitution and illegally scooping up data (as they have done in the past). On the contrary, this time they've been very careful to try to remain within the law, and one of those arguments is by pointing out that, according to the law, some types of information are less protected than others.
Greenwald can educate all he wants, but the problem isn't that Americans are stupid or whatever you all seem to think. Americans on the large have been assuming the NSA is doing far worse than what Snowden accused them of, because Americans (on the large) expect that the NSA (or some other branch of the government) is actually able to intercept and listen in on "those jihadis' phone calls and emails".
You're talking about a generation of Americans who grew up listening to PBS stories hounding the Federal government agencies of the Bush and Clinton Administrations for "not connecting the dots", and for having a "lack of imagination", and for "treating terrorism like a law enforcement" problem and for being hamstrung by a bunch of civil liberties protections.
This is by and large the same generation that decided to vote against privacy when they bought into to having their digital lives collectively managed by Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Explain the low-level bits and bytes to them all you want, but they've already voted on the big picture they want to see.
I think that's the key insight. It may not be legal for NSA to look at records of US citizens, but build a search engine and there are other departments for whom it is legal to do that. NSA just becomes the facilitator or router of the data.
Is that even what's being described? I don't see any reason why it would be bad to let the DEA search an NSA database of intelligence about foreign suspects.
The problem is (as it's always been) that they aren't just criminal suspects and they aren't all foreign. But that was the problem whether or not the NSA built a "Google."
Also, this article goes over "parallel construction" quite a lot. Although we've heard about it a lot in the past year, this leak shows how and what kind of data NSA is sharing with DEA, FBI, etc.
It's even more important for us to know what kinds of data about us domestic law enforcement has access to, than it is to know what foreign intelligence has access to.
Comments
This, as with most of Greenwald's work on this subject, has been a slow effort to educate people about a very technical (for the average person) topic. Building on previous reports that showed the type of activity and the threat it can cause, this installment is about establishing the pattern of illegality.
If the NSA could justify the time and expense to make a search tool, there must be a lot of searching needs... which aren't legal for the NSA to send to the domestic-oriented agencies.
Also, more explicitly-stated details about how powerful "metadata" can be. Obvious to anybody who understands INNER JOIN, but this is still new for most people.
//Of course, I'm sure all this ignoring of warrants and the 4th Amendment, to quote a DOJ lawyer in the recent EFF mess regarding Jewel v NSA, is all for the "national security of this company". (emphasis mine)
The power of metadata is implicit. No one at NSA is arguing that metadata isn't powerful, that's the whole reason they're collecting it.
What the NSA is arguing is against the meme that they're trodding roughshod over the Constitution and illegally scooping up data (as they have done in the past). On the contrary, this time they've been very careful to try to remain within the law, and one of those arguments is by pointing out that, according to the law, some types of information are less protected than others.
Greenwald can educate all he wants, but the problem isn't that Americans are stupid or whatever you all seem to think. Americans on the large have been assuming the NSA is doing far worse than what Snowden accused them of, because Americans (on the large) expect that the NSA (or some other branch of the government) is actually able to intercept and listen in on "those jihadis' phone calls and emails".
You're talking about a generation of Americans who grew up listening to PBS stories hounding the Federal government agencies of the Bush and Clinton Administrations for "not connecting the dots", and for having a "lack of imagination", and for "treating terrorism like a law enforcement" problem and for being hamstrung by a bunch of civil liberties protections.
This is by and large the same generation that decided to vote against privacy when they bought into to having their digital lives collectively managed by Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Explain the low-level bits and bytes to them all you want, but they've already voted on the big picture they want to see.
I think that's the key insight. It may not be legal for NSA to look at records of US citizens, but build a search engine and there are other departments for whom it is legal to do that. NSA just becomes the facilitator or router of the data.
Is that even what's being described? I don't see any reason why it would be bad to let the DEA search an NSA database of intelligence about foreign suspects.
The problem is (as it's always been) that they aren't just criminal suspects and they aren't all foreign. But that was the problem whether or not the NSA built a "Google."
Also, this article goes over "parallel construction" quite a lot. Although we've heard about it a lot in the past year, this leak shows how and what kind of data NSA is sharing with DEA, FBI, etc.
It's even more important for us to know what kinds of data about us domestic law enforcement has access to, than it is to know what foreign intelligence has access to.