My attention was drawn recently to two detailed and informative news articles (in The Guardian and The Age) about Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into the NSA program and the declassification of documents relating to its bulk surveillance operations.
In brief, issues raised included:
a) criticism of• the truthfulness of statements made to Congress in March by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence;
• the conflating to Congress by intelligence officials of the value of phone and internet communications surveillance;
• the NSA argument that “terrorist plots” were successfully “disrupted” by its bulk phone record collection;
• the fact that “technical personnel responsible for NSA’s corporate infrastructure and transmission of metadata” may handle phone records data without the “special training” in court-ordered restrictions undergone by NSA intelligence analysts; and
• the NSA claim that providing information about the number of American citizens whose data was included in its database would violate their privacy.
b) concerns that:• the bulk surveillance collection program was insufficiently transparent;
• its usefulness for stopping terrorist attacks was overstated by the NSA, despite no evidence that this has occurred;
• Congress had been “deceived and actively misled” about the extent of (so-called “accidental”) abuses of NSA’s databases;
• the program involved massive privacy implications; and
• judges’ definition of the “relevance” of criteria (when asked to authorise warrants for the collection of records by the FBI) was vague.
Hmmm.