From: "Randy" 

(from politech:)

To: letters{at}washpost.com
From: phred{at}sunlightdata.com 
Subject: Posner on the Panopticon
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:35:45 -0800

One has to gasp at the slippery logic in Judge Richard Posner's view
("Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis," Dec. 21) that the
government's "machine collection and processing of data cannot, as
such, invade privacy."

For those who have followed his writing, Posner is, unremarkably, a
supporter of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's thought experiment for a
prison in which all actions are tracked invisibly by a central authority.

Bentham justified his concept on the grounds of cost-effectiveness
-- prisoners would self-regulate their activity to the norms of the
unobserved authority.  But in a free society, it is we the people who
determine what is legal, and not an unaccountable central authority.

The Founders of our nation knew that liberty must support the necessary
means for securing self-protection, while the tendency of security is to
find self-fulfillment through the suppression of liberty.

In an uncertain world, it is impossible to predetermine the perfect mix. 
Instead, our system of checks and balances was specifically designed to
allow that process to unfold as circumstances change.

The likelihood, given the pervasiveness of electronic communication, is
that most of us will be caught in the drift nets of unimpeded federal
surveillance.  It may be that, as Posner suggests, no federal agent will
ever view our captured thoughts.  But experience shows that unimpeded
access leads to abuses of authority and suppression of our great freedoms
of speech and opposition to arbitrary government power.

Following Posner's view, security always stands paramount, and therefore
liberty always loses.  But as Benjamin Franklin wrote, � �Whoever would
overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of
speech.� �

Fred Heutte
Portland, Oregon


"Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news:43adffce$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> As judge Posner said, the President would be criminally negligent had he
> NOT
> instituted this surveillance.
>
> Gary
>
> "Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
> news:43addbbf{at}w3.nls.net...
>> Well let's let the NSA capture all the data at their leisure without a
> court
>> approval. How soon before the government decides to use the 'pattern
>> matching' for other than 'terrorist' activity? The  RIAA and MPAA are
>> probably wringing their hands in anticipation.
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html
>>
>> WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and
>> analyzed
>> large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and
> out
>> of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President
>> Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of
>> terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
>>
>> The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice
>> networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White
>> House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping
>> directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main
> arteries,
>> they said.
>>
>> As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic
> surveillance
>> without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American
>> telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of
>> domestic and international communications, the officials said.
>>
>> The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic
> have
>> raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials
> familiar
>> with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence
>> Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications
>> growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court
>> has
>> legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass
>> through American-based telephonic "switches," according
to officials
>> familiar with the matter.
>>
>> "There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in
conversations with
> the
>> court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways
> through
>> which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about
> access
>> to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you
>> minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes
> of
>> traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."
>>
>> Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance
>> program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his
>> executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to
>> the
>> monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving
> people
>> with known links to Al Qaeda.
>>
>> What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians,
> besides
>> actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through
> large
>> volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might
> point
>> to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large
>> data-mining operation.
>>
>> The current and former government officials who discussed the program
>> were
>> granted anonymity because it remains classified.
>>
>> Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the
> technical
>> aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look
> for
>> clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many
> details
>> of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of
>> Congress
>> who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to
>> learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its
> legality.
>>
>> Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have
>> knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze
>> communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling
>> whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and
>> the
>> origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and
>> from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular
>> interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.
>>
>> This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the
United States
>> would,
>> in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted
>> to
>> trace who calls whom.
>>
>> The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in
>> other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection
> with
>> the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for
>> tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps
>> program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately
>> scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil
>> liberties
>>
>> But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and
>> analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to
> detect
>> terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with
> the
>> program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by
>> Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not
>> give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats
> at
>> home.
>>
>> A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said
> that
>> since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have
> been
>> storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal
>> government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.
>>
>> "All that data is mined with the cooperation of the
government and shared
>> with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in
> that
>> area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not
> want
>> his name or that of his former company used because of concern about
>> revealing trade secrets.
>>
>> Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as
>> eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.
>>
>> "If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is
> going
>> to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he
said. "Massive
>> amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, who is in
>> Osama Bin Laden's circle of family and friends - is used to identify
>> lines
>> of communication that are then given closer scrutiny."
>>
>> Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the
>> N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of
> some
>> of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to
>> switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States'
>> communications networks and international networks. The identities of the
>> corporations involved could not be determined.
>>
>> The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some
>> Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the
>> globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many
>> international-to-international calls are also routed through such
>> American
>> switches.
>>
>> One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the
>> N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American
>> government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the
>> telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international
> traffic
>> that is routed through American-based switches.
>>
>> The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the
>> intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully
>> addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now
>> that
>> foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some
>> judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those
>> calls
>> as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the
>> Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved
>> warrants for domestic surveillance.
>>
>> Historically, the American intelligence community has had close
>> relationships with many communications and computer firms and related
>> technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major
>> telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of
>> major
>> corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's
> operational
>> capability, according to current and former government officials.
>>
>> Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West
>> Coast
>> telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be
>> significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like
> this,
>> what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum
>> operation to sweep up data," he said.
>>
>>
>>
>
>

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