From Tom Dispatch: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175750/tomgram%3A_calabrese_and_harwood%2C_privacy_down_the_drain/
The NSA Isn’t the Only Government Agency Exploiting Technology to Make Privacy Obsolete
By Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood
September 22, 2013
For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with “burner” phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents “are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.
You’re probably assuming that we’re talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but we’re not. We’re talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.
While in these last months the NSA has cast a long, dark shadow over American privacy, don’t for a second imagine that it’s the only government agency systematically and often secretly intruding on our lives. In fact, a remarkable traffic jam of local, state, and federal government authorities turn out to be exploiting technology to wriggle into the most intimate crevices of our lives, take notes, use them for their own purposes, or simply file them away for years on end.
“Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up,” the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt told a tech conference in March. “It’s moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.”
Hunt’s right. The American public and the legal system have been left in the dust when it comes to infringements and intrusions on privacy. In one way, however, he was undoubtedly being coy. After all, the government is an active, eager, and early adopter of intrusive technologies that make citizens’ lives transparent on demand.
Continue reading at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175750/tomgram%3A_calabrese_and_harwood%2C_privacy_down_the_drain/
