From Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/11/us-urgent-need-surveillance-reforms
Ensure Oversight and Effective Safeguards for Privacy, Free Speech
June 11, 2013
(New York) – Recent revelations about the scope of US national security surveillance highlight how dramatic increases in private digital communications and government computing power are fueling surveillance practices that impinge on privacy in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. There is an urgent need for the US Congress to reevaluate and rewrite surveillance laws in light of those technological developments and put in place better safeguards against security agency overreach.
A string of media reports describing secret US surveillance programs underscore the degree to which laws originally designed to track phone records relating to criminal investigations have been expanded to authorize the collection of vast quantities of new forms of data that intrude much more deeply into the private lives of both citizens and non-citizens.
“Existing laws do not seem to have kept up with the threat to privacy and other rights posed by the government’s relatively new capacity to collect and analyze quickly vast quantities of personal information,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “Because oversight is secret and inspires little confidence, there is every reason to fear that the scope of surveillance extends far beyond what can be justified by the government’s legitimate interest in addressing terrorist or other security threats.”
A report in The Guardian says intelligence agencies are collecting information from phone companies relating to the calls of millions of people, under orders granted in secret proceedings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The leaked order requires Verizon Business Services, under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, to produce information related to all telephone calls in its systems, both within the United States and between the US and other countries. The order is valid for three months but appears to be regularly renewed.
The information sought is “metadata,” which includes the numbers of both parties to a call, their locations, the time and duration of the calls, and other identifying information. The contents of conversations are not covered, but the government has an ever increasing capacity to analyze metadata to show the caller’s likely identity, social networks, and other patterns or behavior the government may want to target. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) is also collecting records from AT&T and Sprint, Internet service providers, and information about credit card transactions. The government’s rapidly growing capacity to cross-reference and analyze this data enables it to paint a stunningly complete picture of the life of almost anyone whose data it picks up.
Continue reading at: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/11/us-urgent-need-surveillance-reforms
