Peek-a-Boo
There's been a great amount of noise made recently about Bush's authorization for the NSA to eavesdrop on telecommunications without court approval. The authorization was given after 9/11, to allow spy agency to quickly narrow the scope on suspected terrorists. The Bush administration has steadfastly held that such ability to gather and analyze information is required for rapid response to suspected terrorism action. Critics have charged that the measures the spy agencies have taken violate civil liberties and privacy of Americans. Now, the New York Times that those early reports of the Bush administration enthusiasm, were only skimming the surface. What the NSA has been doing is nothing short of data mining the telecommunications flowing across the network backbone. The NSA has gained the cooperation of the major network carriers in gathering, analyzing and applying pattern recognition algorithms to data on just about every bit of electronic communications.
Now, did anybody seriously ever think that such things weren't actually happening? To a certain extent, if such things weren't happening, I'd be really worried. The James Bond era of gathering data via people in the field has been losing ground to more and more electronic surveillance for sometime. Spying on the bad guys, suspected bad guys and just plain looking for trouble before trouble finds us is a good thing. It should be happening. What I find troubling is the lack of oversight. Who's watching the watchmen? Here's where things get real murky for the Bush administration. Bush's response to such questions has typically been of the "trust me" nature. That's enough to leave 50% of American's coughing nervously -- for the rest of the world, that's probably closer to 100% -- especially as the New York Times is reporting that more and more international-to-international communications is flowing across American based telecommunications infrastructure.
Spying is good. Without oversight, it's bad. Part of that oversight should be metrics to assess whether the price freedom is paying for catching the bad guys is actually worth it. For all the spying that the Americans have been doing, I'd hope that someone is looking at their success rates and determining if it's all worth it. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not.
Now, did anybody seriously ever think that such things weren't actually happening? To a certain extent, if such things weren't happening, I'd be really worried. The James Bond era of gathering data via people in the field has been losing ground to more and more electronic surveillance for sometime. Spying on the bad guys, suspected bad guys and just plain looking for trouble before trouble finds us is a good thing. It should be happening. What I find troubling is the lack of oversight. Who's watching the watchmen? Here's where things get real murky for the Bush administration. Bush's response to such questions has typically been of the "trust me" nature. That's enough to leave 50% of American's coughing nervously -- for the rest of the world, that's probably closer to 100% -- especially as the New York Times is reporting that more and more international-to-international communications is flowing across American based telecommunications infrastructure.
Spying is good. Without oversight, it's bad. Part of that oversight should be metrics to assess whether the price freedom is paying for catching the bad guys is actually worth it. For all the spying that the Americans have been doing, I'd hope that someone is looking at their success rates and determining if it's all worth it. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not.
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