"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." --James Madison
2013-06-07-digest

As both a candidate for president in 2008 and for Senate in 2006, Barack Obama routinely railed against the Patriot Act, and, more specifically, warrantless wiretaps and tracking of phone records by George W. Bush's administration. Now that he's the big man in the Oval Office, however, Obama evidently finds such things useful. Sauce for the goose and all that.

"The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April," reports the UK's Guardian thanks to a top-secret document leaked to anti-antiterror reporter Glenn Greenwald. The order, granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25, is effective through July 19, and it requires Verizon on an "ongoing daily basis" to provide the NSA with data on all calls from its 121 million customers on its U.S. network. AT&T and Sprint are evidently part of the program too.

The Guardian further notes, "Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered." We'll see if the latter is true for Greenwald when he's named a "criminal conspirator" by the Obama Justice Department. Kidding aside, that's an important distinction -- data record collection, which the Supreme Court condoned under the Fourth Amendment, versus the actual content of the call, which requires a warrant.

The NSA uses such broad data collection to pinpoint terrorist cells and prevent attacks. This week's story isn't exactly news, either, given that record collection was first reported in 2006, and this particular order falls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, first enacted in 2001.

Thursday, The Washington Post also reported that Team Obama and its NSA and FBI are mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in a program code-named PRISM. The government says that program, established in 2007 but expanded by Obama, "targets" only foreigners, and many of the companies deny knowledge of it.

In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama self-righteously and angrily denounced Bush's policies and promised to discontinue them: "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining the Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping ... [spying] on citizens ... tracking citizens who do nothing but protest... No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. ... The law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers ... justice is not arbitrary. [Bush] acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security... The first thing I will do, when I am president, is call in my attorney general and ... review every executive order issued by George Bush to determine which of those have undermined civil liberties, which are unconstitutional, and I will reverse them with a stroke of a pen."

Oops.

That brings us to one difference between the actions of the Bush and Obama administrations. Under the Bush administration, data collection, as well as actual wiretapping, was clearly aimed at thwarting al-Qa'ida and other terrorist agents, while the Obama administration's objective is less clear. Just last week, in fact, Obama declared that the War on Terror is over, which makes one wonder why the data collection is necessary. Are we fighting terrorism or not?