Why NSA Reform Is So Important?

A few days ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the NSA’s domestic mass communications surveillance and data-mining program illegal.  This ruling was followed up by the U.S. House of Representatives voting to end the controversial program via the USA Freedom Act, a reform bill the House overwhelmingly passed last week.  Now the Senate must decide whether to renew key provisions of the Patriot Act that allow the government to collect phone metadata on millions of Americans.

Almost two years ago, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's bulk collection of domestic phone and Internet records, setting off a firestorm of debate on whether this program is unconstitutional or effective in identifying and preventing acts of terrorism.   You might ask ‘How does this legislation affect me since I’m not a terrorist or a criminal?’  The answer to this question is to use your common sense to determine how a political, business, law enforcement, or even criminal entity might gain an insurmountable advantage by having illegal access to the CONTENT of millions of people’s phone and Internet communications.

 Even though the government continues to maintain that the content of American’s communications is not being captured, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice says they are lying.  Tice has come forward with information that during the Bush administration, the NSA spied on selected politicians, military personnel, Supreme Court Justices, lawyers and law firms, journalists and news organizations, and businesses – as well as their family members.  

Whether the supporters of the NSA surveillance programs are lying about capturing content or not, in reality, it is difficult to distinguish email metadata from email content.  Distinctions that might make sense for telephone conversations and data about those conversations do not always hold for online communications.

“The calls you make can reveal a lot, but now that so much of our lives are mediated by the Internet, your IP [internet protocol] logs are really a real-time map of your brain: what are you reading about, what are you curious about, what personal ad are you responding to (with a dedicated email linked to that specific ad), what online discussions are you participating in, and how often?” said Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.  “Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that’s in many ways on par with reading your diary,” Sanchez added.

What are your thoughts?