Domestic surveillance puts civil liberties at risk (Tampa Bay Times)

[struggle4progress]

By the Times Editorial Board
Published Monday, April 14, 2008 6:36 PM

... Though the agency says it acts within the law, the report says a number of NSA employees have raised concerns that the agency is reaching beyond its legal authority by engaging in domestic surveillance. The Journal, quoting an unnamed official, estimates that the budget for the data-sifting effort is more than $1-billion.

What the agency is reportedly trawling through is not the content of e-mails but the transactional data, which can be nearly as personal and revelatory. That would include things such as the names of e-mail recipients and the subject lines, Web searches and sites visited, telephone activity including cell phone locations, travel itineraries and other details that expose a great deal about someone's private life.

Many of the databases used by the NSA were built by other federal agencies, including the Treasury Department's database of money transfers. The NSA is ostensibly using these government repositories as well as those from private companies, including the telecoms, in order to build a system that essentially looks at those moves Americans make that can leave an electronic footprint.

If the NSA is engaged in dragnet-type searches, looking for needles in haystacks by violating the privacy of millions of Americans, then Congress needs to intervene, just as it did to shut down the Pentagon program. A surveillance society where everyone is tracked is not an America we recognize. Our civil liberties should not be so easily violated.

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editorials/article456491.ece

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. The cell phones are the major thing.

They passed laws that they all have to have GPS, so they are now tracking the location of everybody all the time whenever they have a cell phone with them, even to different rooms in your house. If we took time capsule back to a few decades ago and told them that everybody would willingly carry a tracking device around with them and the government could track them at all times, they would think we were on crack. But we're there.