Care about metadata

Be alarmed! You are living among millions of potential terrorists.

These terrorists could be anyone. They could be a foreign citizen, a foreign leader, your neighbor or even you.

It has been hard to miss the maelstrom of media frenzy surrounding Edward Snowden’s leaked documents. Even as the initial media blitz has subsided, news on the extent of National Security Agency surveillance seem to arise every week.

When the NSA begins to defend its programs, the hypocrisy is blatant. Its own guidelines of collecting as little information as possible to prevent terrorist attacks seems to have little effect on the actions of its employees. To put the amount of information collected — 250 million email accounts per year — in perspective, this is greater than hundreds of times of even the most generous estimates on the size of Al-Qaida.

The NSA claims that metadata, which are contact lists and phone logs, does not constitute surveillance. But the nature of our communications is an extension of our personality and is no less distinct to us than our name or birthday.

Gen. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that “there are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.” With each new development to the story, Clapper’s testimony becomes harder to believe.

In Clapper’s logic, if data, even personal data, is collected by an algorithm that detects suspicious communication is not operated by a human, this does not constitute an unreasonable search and seizure. The flaws in this argument are not difficult to see.

Who programmed this algorithm that collects data? Who gave the order to begin surveilling “suspicious” communication? Humans. It is time we stopped allowing the intelligence community to hide behind its circular logic and erroneous justifications.

The principal issue at hand is that the federal government is knowingly and wantonly violating the most fundamental principle of the United States’ justice system. Citizens are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Warrants, wiretaps and all manner of intelligence gathering methods on lesser levels of the U.S. justice system require explicit proof of reasonable suspicion for the invasion of privacy to be authorized. The NSA’s exception to this rule has not yet been explained by any public official.

If the monitoring of U.S. citizens alone is not troubling enough for you, new reports detail a division of the NSA called “Tailored Access Operations.,” which monitors the communications of “special targets.”

These devious, subversive “special targets” include known deviants such as several Mexican presidents. Try to imagine the awkward phone call to ensue between President Obama and Mexican President Peña Nieto.

Whether it be a sense of patriarchal responsibility or lingering post-Sept. 11 fervor, this overextension by the NSA should be of concern to you. Regardless of intention, the NSA is monitoring our personal communication without reasonable suspicion of guilt. At face value, this is not likely to have any immediate effect on our lives.

The question becomes, “Will we continue to allow our public officials to lie to us about their ability to monitor our lives?”

­— johnfren@indiana.edu
Follow columnist John French on Twitter @JOHN_M_FRENCH.