Thank You, Edward Snowden
Ronald Bailey: ”The NSA has turned the internet into a giant surveillance platform.” ■ The walls of surveillance secrecy were finally cracked by the June revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden’s files conclusively show that the federal government has been operating a vast spying program that violates the Fourth Amendment rights of tens of millions of ordinary Americans. To justify this surveillance, the government offers tortured legal interpretations of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. ● Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of the communications of foreigners outside of the United States. As Snowden’s documents reveal, the NSA has interpreted Section 702 as a backdoor loophole allowing the agency to retain and comb through the call data and emails of Americans whose communications are “about” a terror suspect or have been “inadvertently” intercepted by the NSA’s PRISM monitoring program. The even more egregious violations of our constitutional rights, Snowden revealed, occurred under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which the NSA has used to justify the dragnet collection and retention of the call metadata of essentially all Americans. (Metadata includes the numbers called and the location, date, time, and duration of each call.)