Surveillance

last updated 8 January 2015

'œWe are all suspects now,' said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. The National Security Agency, it turns out, is not merely tracking the telephone calls of suspected terrorists. According to a report in USA Today last week, the NSA has been trying to collect records on every phone conversation made within our borders since shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It's probably the largest database ever assembled, containing about 2 trillion phone numbers. And guess what?—'œYou're in it.” Begun under CIA Director-designate Gen. Michael Hayden, the program analyzes phone calls to detect patterns that might reveal terrorist activity. But it could also lead to guilt by association. 'œSuppose you call your friend Bob, who later calls his friend Rashid, who later calls his cousin in Kabul. The government may conclude you're consorting with associates of al Qaida.' This is how people get locked up in Kafkaesque dictatorships, and if we continue down this road, 'œwe may find that the free society we claim to cherish has become a police state.”

That's 'œludicrous,' said Andrew McCarthy in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The NSA doesn't have access to such personal identifying information as names and addresses. Nor does it have recordings or transcripts of actual conversations. The database simply shows who's calling whom. From this, the agency tries to glean 'œwhat numbers al Qaida agents are contacting in our midst, and which numbers those contacts then call. The system is designed to target only those contacts, rather than the rest of us, for investigation.' It's perfectly legal, since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in the past that the public has 'œno reasonable expectation” that its phone records are private, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The White House has public opinion on its side too. An ABC News/Washington Post poll has found that 63 percent of those surveyed approve of the NSA program, with 44 percent 'œstrongly' approving.

'œThat is just stunning,' said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. In this privacy-obsessed country, the revelation that all our calls are being tracked should 'œspark thundering outrage from sea to shining sea.' But it's not—because the White House has spent five years stoking our fears 'œto get Americans to accept the previously unacceptable.” We're told we're vulnerable to attack, so we must torture suspected terrorists. We're told that Iraq could attack us with WMD, so we must launch a war. And now we're told that there are terrorists lurking among us, so we must approve of the surveillance of every American citizen. Because we're so afraid of another 9/11, Bush gets away with these abuses of power even when he gets caught in 'œa baldfaced lie.” For months, Bush has been assuring us that the NSA's 'œterrorist surveillance program' only involved select phone calls placed to and from overseas. Now we know that isn't true.