“Sigamos hablando; me encanta hablar contigo, mamá”. Esas fueron las últimas palabras que me dijo mi único hijo, Daniel, cuando limpiábamos el sótano después de sus festejos de cumpleaños. Todavía estaba muy feliz debido a un glorioso fin de semana en casa con sus padres y amigos.
Entonces sonó el timbre de la puerta. Daniel subió apresuradamente las escaleras. Segundos después, mientras yo estaba sola en nuestro sótano, mi amado hijo fue asesinado a balazos. Mark Anderl, mi esposo desde hace 25 años, recibió tres disparos y resultó gravemente herido.
Esta tragedia, la peor pesadilla de toda madre, ocurrió por una razón que no tiene nada que ver con mi esposo ni con mi hijo, sino más bien con mi trabajo: soy una jueza de distrito de Estados Unidos.… Seguir leyendo »
Americans haven't had much good news about their privacy since Edward Snowden launched his soap opera of NSA revelations last June. True, the president, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Patriot Act co-author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner are finally distancing themselves from the most outrageous snooping. But it hasn't stopped. According to the New York Times, a request from one U.S. phone company to cease sharing its records with the National Security Agency was rebuffed in March by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — the secret federal tribunal that mostly seems to specialize in saying "yes" to surveillance.
About half of Americans tell pollsters they are alarmed by these trends.… Seguir leyendo »
The month-long sojourn of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Chinese soil ended with his departure for Moscow and other parts after Hong Kong’s refusal to issue a warrant for his arrest despite an American request.
From China’s standpoint, this is the best resolution possible. It has been the main beneficiary of the whistleblower’s accusations against the American government, and it will now be spared a prolonged battle in the Hong Kong courts over whether Snowden should be extradited.
Snowden turned up in the former British colony at roughly the same time as a summit meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in California, at which time the American leader berated his Chinese counterpart for alleged involvement in large-scale cyber espionage against the United States
Snowden’s release of information about massive U.S.… Seguir leyendo »
Should unauthorized disclosures of classified information be praised or condemned?
The events of recent weeks -- and the disclosures of Edward Snowden in particular -- have propelled this question to the forefront of public debate. Unfortunately, the responses have been polarized, with some hailing leakers as patriots, and others condemning them as traitors. Some have cited the Founding Fathers to make the case that Snowden was justified in revealing secrets. As is often the case, the truth is more complicated.
The first thing to bear in mind is that employees such as Snowden volunteer to be entrusted with classified information. When they disclose secrets, they are violating the trust that they have asked to be placed in themselves.… Seguir leyendo »
The revelation that the federal government has been secretly gathering records on the phone calls and online activities of millions of Americans and foreigners seems not to have alarmed most Americans. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center over the four days immediately after the news first broke found that just 41 percent of Americans deemed it unacceptable that the National Security Agency “has been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.”
We privacy watchers and civil libertarians think this complacent response misses a deeply worrying political shift of vast consequence. While President Obama has conveniently described the costs of what appears to be pervasive surveillance of Americans’ telecommunications connections as “modest encroachments on privacy,” what we are actually witnessing is a sea change in the kinds of things that the government can monitor in the lives of ordinary citizens.… Seguir leyendo »
President Obama's response to the troubling news of indiscriminate government collection of communication information was meant to be reassuring: The NSA is operating under supervision by all three branches of government, he assured us.
Even if this were true — and it is not — this purported defense should make us more nervous, not less, because it suggests that Washington has become entirely comfortable with keeping basic information from the American public about what powers of surveillance the government claims it can lawfully use.
The secret court that apparently authorized this program operates nothing like the judicial branch contemplated by the Constitution as a check on abuses of governmental power and a neutral evaluator of whether governmental conduct complies with the Constitution.… Seguir leyendo »
Recent revelations about the extent of government phone and Internet surveillance are already shaking up the national debate.
But these programs are just symptoms of broader changes that will be shaking up our government and society for many decades to come.
Let's not cheapen or simplify the debate by trying to ram these revelations into the GOP-friendly framework of "another Obama scandal."
We should be honest and admit that something much bigger than that is going on here. The implication of the issue for our politics will be felt long after today's round of political "gotcha" and "pin the tail on the donkey" has faded away.… Seguir leyendo »
Since it was revealed this week that the National Security Agency is collecting the telephone and Internet data of millions of people, this is the question most people have asked me more than any other: "Why should I care that the government has all this information?"
On Thursday, as we were learning that the NSA has been storing the so-called metadata of millions of Verizon customers, a woman told me that she was less concerned about the intelligence agency knowing her phone number than she was the local CVS, which has been calling her at inconvenient times and pressuring her to renew prescriptions she was filling at another pharmacy.… Seguir leyendo »
The revelations this week that the federal government has been scooping up records of telephone calls inside the United States for seven years, and secretly collecting information from Internet companies on foreigners overseas for nearly six years, have elicited predictable outrage from liberals and civil libertarians.
Is the United States no better than those governed by repressive dictators who have no regard for individual rights? Could President Obama credibly raise human rights issues with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at a summit meeting on Friday, if America is running its own vast surveillance state? Has Mr. Obama, for all his talk of ending the “war on terror,” taken data mining to new levels unimagined by his predecessor, George W.… Seguir leyendo »
When assuming office, every government official must take an oath to abide by and uphold our Constitution. Since 2010, I have made that my mission in Congress. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is not upholding nor abiding by the Constitution -- in fact, this administration is going to great lengths to continually violate it.
Its most recent transgression involves the use of domestic drones.
These small drones are to be used as a crime fighting tool for law enforcement officials. But is unwarranted and constant surveillance by an aerial eye of Big Government the answer?
In a memorandum issued by President Barack Obama's secretary of the Air Force, the stated purpose of these drones is "balancing ...… Seguir leyendo »
If you thought the wiretapping controversy ended last summer, when Congress blessed the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program by passing a new surveillance law that greatly enhanced the powers of the National Security Agency, think again. The legacy of the illegal operation represents a serious problem for the Obama administration.
After a contentious hearing this month on the most controversial aspect of the new law — a blanket grant of immunity to the telecom giants like AT&T that secretly permitted the N.S.A. to siphon off their customers’ communications — a federal judge in San Francisco must decide whether Congress has the authority to bestow absolution on private companies that appear to have violated the law.… Seguir leyendo »
Two years ago, I stated my belief that the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and disregard for domestic and international law poses a direct challenge to our constitutional order, and “constitutes a far greater threat than the lawlessness of Richard Nixon.”
That was not a casual comparison. When I was on the staff of the National Security Council, my home phone was tapped by the Nixon administration — without a warrant — beginning in 1969. The wiretap stayed on for 21 months. The reason? My boss, Henry Kissinger, and the director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, believed that I might have leaked information to this newspaper.… Seguir leyendo »
One of the most critical weapons in the fight against terrorists and other foreign intelligence threats -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- has not kept up with the technology revolution we have experienced over the past 30 years. We are on the brink of bringing this 20th-century tool in line with 21st-century technology and threats. The Senate has passed a strong bill, by an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin, that would modernize FISA and do the right thing for those companies that responded to their country's call for assistance in its hour of need. It would also protect the civil liberties we Americans cherish.… Seguir leyendo »
For almost two years, the country has debated whether the Bush administration acted properly and lawfully in undertaking emergency surveillance operations of suspected foreign terrorists on presidential authorization in the wake of 9/11. For several months, we have been debating bills that seek to modernize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court statute.
There are many complex and difficult issues associated with these debates, but whether to terminate the huge lawsuits that have been filed against the nation’s major telecommunications carriers accused of cooperating with classified counterterrorism programs is not one of them. Whatever one feels about the underlying intelligence activities or the legal basis on which they were initially established, it would be unfair and contrary to the interests of the United States to allow litigation that tries to hold private telecommunications companies liable for them.… Seguir leyendo »
In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Bush administration had a choice: Aggressively pursue potential terrorists using existing laws or devise new, secret intelligence programs in uncharted legal waters.
Unfortunately, President Bush often chose the latter, and the legitimacy and effectiveness of our efforts to fight terrorism were dramatically undermined.
The president's warrantless surveillance program and his decision to go it alone -- without input from Congress or the courts -- have had devastating consequences. One is that private companies, which would normally comply with legitimate national security requests, now have incentive to say no.
Here's why. Within weeks of the 2001 attacks, communications companies received written requests and directives for assistance with intelligence activities authorized by the president.… Seguir leyendo »
Congress just passed, and President Bush hurriedly signed, a law that amends the legal framework for the electronic interception of various kinds of communication with foreign sources. Almost immediately, commentators concluded that the law was unnecessary, that it authorized a lawless and unprecedented expansion of presidential authority, and that Democrats in Congress cravenly accepted this White House initiative only for the basest political reasons. None of these widely broadcast conclusions are likely to be true.
All sides agree that some legislative fix is required because of changes in telecommunications technology. Where once it made sense to require warrants when one party to a foreign conversation was in America, this ceased to be the case when American routers became the transit points for foreign conversations that might or might not involve a person in the United States.… Seguir leyendo »
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