Irreal

Back in August, I wrote a post about Jennifer Granick’s outstanding article, My Dinner With NSA Director Keith Alexander, that appeared in Forbes. Now Granick is back with another great article that discusses the recent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on the NSA’s widespread surveillance. That report, as you’ve probably heard, concluded that the mass accumulation of telephone metadata was illegal.

Granick makes two excellent points. First, there is no need to make esoteric Fourth Amendment arguments. The surveillance is illegal on its face because, despite what the government keeps saying, it is not authorized by any statute and is, in fact specifically prohibited without such authorization. Once you hear that argument made, it’s perfectly obvious but I’ve never before heard anyone make it.

That insight surely hasn’t escaped those judges ruling in the government’s favor. That can only be described as an intentional ignoring of the law in the service of what they must think of as a greater good. The thing is, in the American democracy there aren’t many greater goods than the rule of law and equal justice.

When you read Granick’s article there won’t be any doubt in your mind that the NSA’s actions are illegal. Her second point, though, is the explosive one. If the phone companies are collecting and turning over to the NSA any information that they wouldn’t collect for their normal billing and if they weren’t provided a warrant showing the data is relevant to an investigation (which of course they haven’t been) then that action is criminal.

It’s too much to hope that anyone is going to go to jail for this behavior—look at James Clapper, after all—but it would be nice if those responsible felt there was more at sake than just a wrist slap from the courts telling them not to do it anymore. Perhaps if their own freedoms were at stake, they’d be a little more considerate of ours.

At any rate, if, like me, you’re concerned about what the NSA is doing you really must read Granick’s article. As I wrote before, she’s one of the few mainstream journalists who appears to understand the issues.

The latest meme being floated by the apologists for the NSA is that Edward Snowden must have been a spy who received aid from the Russians. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was busy pushing that theory on the news shows lately even though, admittedly, he didn’t have any evidence other than a gut feeling that it must be true. His senatorial counterpoint Dianne Feinstein opined that it was certainly possible and should be investigated. Put aside for the moment that there’s absolutely no evidence for this, the whole thing doesn’t even make sense.

Snowden, who is apparently back to being a screw up who could barely walk and chew gum—after being an evil genius after being a screw up—is said to be incapable of arranging his flight to Hong Kong and then Russia. Because, you know, when you have trouble chewing gum, you certainly wouldn’t be able to book reservations even with all those on-line sites. And if he was a Russian agent, why not quietly go to Russia, give them the documents and disappear? The whole theory is ridiculous and doesn’t stand even a second’s scrutiny.

What does Snowden have to say about all this? He terms the charges absurd. So now we have a they said, he said. Who to believe? It’s not that hard to decide. On the one hand, everything Edward Snowden has claimed has turned out to be true. On the other hand, almost everything the government has had to say on the matter, including the denials of Snowden’s claims, has turned out to be false.

So we have Snowden who has been proven correct in his claims against the government which has repeatedly lied, often replacing one lie with another when the first was shown to be false only to have the second lie exposed as well. It’s not hard to know who to believe.

Stephen Haunts has a nice post on remaining private on the Internet. It’s reminiscent of the Prism Break web page that I’ve written about previously. He talks about some of the utilities that you can use out of the box to help maintain your privacy.

Haunts discusses Tor, GnuPG, Tails, TrueCrypt, Silent Circle and other utilities that should be in your toolkit. Take a look at his post and, of course, the Prism-Break page. If we all started using these utilities, privacy in the Internet would increase and we’d all be better off. Except, of course, the NSA.