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A low-key hearing with some alarming analysis.
When the stars exited the high-profile Capitol Hill hearing, most of the audience split — and missed a real show.
The shutdown was under way when the Senate Judiciary Committee recently strained to exhibit normalcy. It inspected intelligence collection, notably the amassing of sky-high loads of information about our phone calls, or so-called “bulk telephony metadata.”
Numerous disclosures raise fears as our privacy inescapably declines. For sure, there’s the justifiable need to find bad guys. But it comes with government’s paternalistic “trust us” response and a Democratic President very comfortable with the lethal toys of national security.
First up this morning was James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency. They’ve testified often of late, melding well-scripted defenses with evasions as they face occasionally grandstanding politicians.
On television newscasts, such sessions can be edited into confrontational melodrama. If truth were told, the actual scenes are often tame and not quite on “the legit,” a phrase I learned while covering the Tony Soprano-like habitués of organized crime.
Testimony is vetted, witnesses tipped to questions and the politicians may read staff-crafted queries with faux theatrics. Both sides often play nice-nice when it’s done — a handshake here, pat on the back there, the choreography over.
The Senate hearing room was packed, including perhaps 20 reporters, as Clapper broke a smidgen of news: He confirmed a secret pilot project that used data from cell phone towers to probe the location of our cell phones.
And, during a minipolemic on the shutdown, he even suggested that devious rivals with satchels of dough could lure furloughed agents pissed off they hadn’t been getting their paychecks.
Journalists blogged and tweeted and, when the furtive duo exited, so did most of them. Who cared about the three academics on the second panel? And, as it turned out, they were actually more interesting and unsettling.
Laura Donahue, a Georgetown Law School professor, confronted the very constitutionality of the bulk collection of data.
“It would collect not just the numbers dialed from the home of a suspected criminal, but all law-abiding citizens’ metadata: whom we call, who calls us, how long we talk, and where were are located when we do so.”
Calls to a rape crisis line, an abortion clinic or a suicide hotline reveal a lot about us. It’s a lot more information than was sought from the criminal in a key 1979 Supreme Court case (Smith vs. Maryland) on which the government partly justifies the metadata program.
“The NSA is engaging in activities that are both illegal and unconstitutional,” said Donahue, a sharp mix of academic and advocate.
She was followed by Edward Felten, a computer science expert at Princeton, who served for two years as the chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission.
With the flamboyance of an actuary, he made clear that given the estimated 3 billion calls made each day in the United States, the data collected from Verizon, AT&T and Sprint amounts to “about 70 million pages of information every day.”
He detailed how computing tools used by law enforcement, including Pen-Link and IBM’s Analyst’s Notebook, can reveal sensitive information about our lives.
Even if authorities don’t know the words spoken, they can extrapolate a great deal from knowing that we called a political party, a doctor who specializes in a rare disease or a bookie, among many others.
“Calling patterns can reveal when we are awake and asleep; our religion; our work habits and our social attitudes; the number of friends we have; and even our civil and political affiliations,” he said.
They might similarly identify close relationships. People involved intimately might call each other a lot, perhaps late at night. A change might tipoff a relationship ending, or a new one starting.
The privacy impacts are obvious, and profound.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) was the sharpest questioner. He raised matters central to the surveillance quandary, including on what constitutes bona fide, warrantless searches.
And does building a haystack present privacy questions even if you don’t know what’s in it?
It’s a good question. Finding a satisfactory answer may be like, well, finding a needle in a haystack.
jwarren@nydailynews.com
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=16014
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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