June 7, 2013
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed Thursday that the U.S. government has been secretly collecting information since 2007, exploiting backdoor access to the systems and data of major Internet and tech companies in search of national security threats. That NSA dragnet, revealed by The Washington Post and The Guardian and code-named PRISM, reportedly taps into user data from Facebook, Google, Apple and other U.S.-based companies. (Those providers have mostly denied that the NSA has such backdoor access.)
If news of the NSA dragnet is true — and it’s hard to believe at this point that it’s not — it’s hard to justify combing through all of the providers’ data and records without a specific due process. One contributor to Forbes.com, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, thinks it’s a capital idea: “This is in fact what governments are supposed to do, so I’m at something of a loss in understanding why people seem to be getting so outraged about it.”
I strongly disagree. While Clapper’s release states that surveillance is “subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch and Congress” and must be “specifically approved by the court to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted,” the release also acknowledges that information about U.S. persons could be acquired in this dragnet. The release states that such acquisition, retention and dissemination of “incidental” findings about citizens will be minimized, but surely there are other, more nuanced ways to catch bad guys.