Last week's revelations are a disturbing harbinger of future surveillance. Two months ago,
this newspaper reported
that the US government has been forcing American telecommunications
companies to turn over the call records of every one of their customers
"on an ongoing daily basis", to allow the NSA to later search those
records when it has a reason to do so. The government has since defended
the program, in part on the theory that Americans' right to privacy is
not implicated by the initial acquisition of their phone records, only
by their later searching.
That legal theory is extraordinarily dangerous because it would allow the NSA to acquire
virtually all digital information today
simply because it might possibly become relevant tomorrow. The
surveillance program revealed by the New York Times report goes one step
further still. No longer is the government simply collecting
information now so that the data is available to search, should a
reasonable suspicion arise at some point in the future; the NSA is
searching
everything now – in real time and without suspicion – merely on the chance that it finds something of interest.
***Read article at The Guardian***
