NSA Surveillance Reflects a Broader Interpretation of the Patriot Act
By Tom Simonite and Rachel Metz
Of the two big U.S. government surveillance projects that came to light this week, the one that might seem less startling—the fact that the National Security Agency gathers Verizon’s U.S. call records—troubled privacy activists more than the report that the NSA can get user data such as e-mails and photographs held by Internet companies including Google and Facebook.That’s because details of the phone surveillance, and the confirmation of its scope by the U.S. director of national intelligence, suggest that the NSA has broadened its interpretation of the 2001 Patriot Act in ways that allow for the mass collection of information about U.S. citizens....
Deirdre Mulligan, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley School of Information and the chair of the Center for Democracy & Technology, is also worried, and she’s not the only one. She attended the Privacy Law Scholars Conference at UC Berkeley on Friday and says the feeling was “morose.”
“I think this revelation makes clear there was a cost to not having a more detailed conversation and public decision about the balances between democracy and policing,” she says...
It seems to me that the time is really ripe for Congress to, in a very detailed and public way, get a better handle on the sorts of activities that we are engaged in in the name of the war on terror,” Mulligan says.