This is a bad one. At 7:05PM last night, the Guardian published this story, that the National Security Administration had, using a top secret court order, been collecting all of the phone data from Verizon, one of America’s biggest phone networks. Not just some of the data; not just of certain individuals under specific investigation: all of it. Every single customer.
It seems Obama will be remembered as the Snooper President. This story comes at the worst possible time for him, struggling as he already is to drag his second term free of the scandals in which it has been mired. Not only that, this is the second government department in less than a month shown to have been wildly overzealous in taking phone records: the Justice Department was caught subpoenaing the same data from Associated Press journalists just a few weeks ago.
The leaked document obtained by the Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald, which is marked Top Secret, instructs the phone company to produce “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’” for all communications operated by Verizon within the US, and from the US to other countries, and then continue to produce it, ongoing, for the three month duration of the order.
What is being collected isn’t call content – this isn’t a wire-tapping operation – but metadata; when a call is made, and to whom, and for how long. James Ball at the Guardian gives a good run-down of what this means here.
In essence what this scandal means is that the Obama-era NSA has simply continued Bush-era tactics. In an eerily similar scandal in 2005, a whistleblower revealed that the NSA had been intercepting telephone records wholesale from AT&T, another telecommunications giant, with the same sort of injunction; which implies that Verizon probably isn’t the only network whose records are being obtained by the government – though it is the only network implicated in this particular leak.
Of course, the President usually doesn’t personally sign off on these things. But that there have been so many violations on his watch hints troublingly of a White House culture that sets a low premium on privacy.
There is a defence to all this, of course. You and I do not work in the Oval Office. We do not know the dangers the US may face, and we do not know how many lives have been saved in exchange for this privacy. It is the NSA’s job to keep people safe, and if it feels it can track terrorists by correlating certain patterns of phone behaviour, then perhaps there is an argument that they are right to do so. Perhaps it is worth it.
But citizens were not given any choice in the matter. This – like the AP subpoena – happened in secret, “Top Secret” in this case. Maybe privacy had to be overridden, and maybe it had to be in secret, for the greater good. But this presidency – this President – wasn’t supposed to operate like this.
(It is not just the administration at fault here, it has to be said. MSNBC’s Adam Serwer astutely pointed out that Congress has twice had the opportunity to vote on amendments that would at least partially to lift the lid on NSA secret surveillance, and twice voted against it.)
Further worrying questions are raised by this issue too, perhaps most haunting of which is: could the secret court order as used by the NSA to requisition data from Verizon – and simultaneously gag them – be used for, say, Facebook data? Or Google data? The NSA is an incredibly secretive organisation; the truth is, we don’t know what they are able to do until, like yesterday, it leaks out.
I’ll end with a quote from a crucial campaign speech Obama made in August 2007, entitled “The War We Need To Win.” In this speech, the ambitious upstart Senator set out his policy stall for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. With a directness that his oratory has lacked of late, Obama eviscerated the Bush administration’s policies for riding roughshod over privacy protections in the name of national security.
This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.
Obama, back in 2007, talking about Bush, concluded: “This Administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.”
In the six years since that speech was given, nothing seems to have changed.
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