The latest revelation from the documents leaked by Edward Snowden is that the NSA has been snatching up cell phone location records by the billions:
The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.
Amy Davidson finds this development especially horrifying:
What would Joseph McCarthy have done if he could have looked up who had been in a particular college dorm room on a day, twenty years before, when students were talking about socialism?
What if people got used to the idea that the government could and would do this, and so picked up the pace and turned away when they saw people gathering to listen to a speaker, or reading a sign on a wall, and never heard or saw what was being said? (The freedom to assemble is linked, in the First Amendment, to the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”) You would know that the government was taking attendance at your church. (This is one reason that the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles has brought suit against the N.S.A., with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.) You would think again before showing up at a talk by a lawyer representing someone the government has called a terrorist. If you were a reporter, or a source, you would wonder how you could safely meet. You might never at all.
Meanwhile, in a lengthy piece on the NSA’s ever-expanding powers, Lizza paints a picture of a compliant Senate Intelligence Committee that has acted by and large as a rubber stamp, or even a lobbying group, for the intelligence community:
[O]n October 29th, the Senate Intelligence Committee retreated to its secret chambers, on the second floor of the Hart Office Building. The room has vaulted doors and steel walls that keep it safe from electronic monitoring; the electricity supply to the room is reportedly filtered, for the same reason. The committee’s fifteen members, eight Democrats and seven Republicans, debated [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein’s intelligence-reform bill, the fisa Improvements Act, for three hours. As Congress and the public have digested the details of Snowden’s disclosures, the legislative debate has narrowed to three big questions: Should Congress reform the e-mail and phone tapping allowed by Section 702 to insure that the communications of innocent Americans are not getting swept up in the N.S.A.’s targeting of terrorists? Should the N.S.A. end the bulk collection of phone metadata now authorized by Section 215? Should the fisa court be reformed to make it less deferential to the government?
The committee’s answer to all three questions was no. By a vote of 11–4, it endorsed the Feinstein bill.
He muses on the NSA’s place in the era of “big data”:
In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. Feinstein maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.
The Dish 