NSA's spying eyes--and ears.

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: WORLD WATCHER - National Security Agency - Column

THE REVELATIONS from former Booz Allen Hamilton analyst Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency's data mining operations (followed by Administration admissions of those operations) have put Americans on notice that their government secretly has been conducting surveillance on millions of Americans, treating them as prosecutors do a criminal suspect, obtaining virtually all of their e-mail correspondence and phone records. NSA has done so with nonpublic authorizations granted by the highly secretive Federal courts established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FISA Courts.

Since at least April of this year, those courts have been authorizing huge domestic data mining operations, granting more than 98% of NSA requests for access to Americans' private communication. NSA is storing the data in massive computer centers with a new $2,000,000,000 facility under construction in Bluffdale, Utah, that will sprawl over 1,500,000 square feet and possess the capacity to hold as much as five zetabytes of data (the equivalent of all data in some 60,000,000,000 iPhone 5s).

The NSA data mining operation, when directed at millions of American citizens, is the greatest violation of Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure in U.S. history. In addition, the interception of private communication to monitor those whose e-mails contain buzzwords that suggest views inimical to the Obama Administration, Congress, the Federal agencies, or the military violates the freedom of speech and press because they are forms of content-based discrimination. The action is comparable to the eavesdropping conducted by totalitarian states, such as the former Soviet Union and present day Communist China. Under the guise of fighting a war on terror, the Federal government has achieved a major victory for the terrorists: acting against its own citizens, violating their civil liberties.

The argument for depriving Americans en masse of their rights to privacy and against unreasonable search and seizure is unpersuasive in logic and law. No one seriously could argue that millions of Americans are cooperating with foreign terrorists in an effort to commit murder, mayhem, or property damage in the U.S. Although there are many dedicated foreign terrorists who aim to achieve those objectives and may depend on the cooperation of conspirators in the U.S., they number in the hundreds or, worst case, thousands, but certainly not in the millions.

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