Secret Spy Surveillance Violates Americans' Privacy Rights

Obama's Comments That the PRISM/NSA Snooping Does Not Violate the Constitution Are Flawed -- Here's Why!

The President said that sweeping up Americans' telephone records and monitoring Internet activity from overseas are "modest encroachments on privacy.... Nobody is listening to your telephone calls..." 

President Obama taking questions on PRISM 

In fact, PRISM is NOT  a modest encroachment on the privacy of Americans. On the contrary it is a  super-powerful surveillance scheme that has enough raw power to profile every American even without delving into the content of their digital messages. PRISM may be legal under current law, but constitutional experts, who understand how it works, say that PRISM violates the Constitution and should be modified with proper safeguards. 

Slavery legislation was legal in George Washington's day, but it violated the spirit of freedom enshrined in the Constitution and required the bloody Civil War to begin setting things straight. Now US spying on citizens with programs like PRISM coupled with FBI secret  National Security Letters is legal but needs to be tested in the courts to determine its constitutionality. This requires transparency not secrecy to preserve Americans' rights to privacy and freedom from coercion.

And much, much more....

None of the far reaching powers of a "data mining" spy programs like PRISM were envisioned by the framers of The Constitution or the lawmakers who wrote privacy protections into federal law. Digital technology and its corollaries have grown so fast and all-encompassing that their power to reveal private information is truly remarkable. 

News stories about Edward Snowden's revelations about PRISM and government spying and lying are being written by reporters and commentators who demonstrate abominable ignorance about "data mining" and KDD - Knowledge Discovery in Databases. With the exception of expert practitioners of this spying technique most Americans remain in the dark.

Obama knows that surveys confirm the fact that Americans fear terrorism more than secret government surveillance. The questions needs to be asked: Did the President mislead the public about what PRISM does and how it works? Initially he did. But Obama's statements in the last few days have moderated. He even avoided personal condemnation of Edward Snowden's revelations that the government lied at public hearings to Congress and misled members of Congress in secret hearings.

Edward Snowden revealed that PRISM obtained citizens' data from private companies like Verizon, Google and others using secret warrant-less National Security Letters (NSL). These orders force an individual or an organization's officials to turn over confidential information, and at the same time, it gags such persons from ever mentioning they were served with an NSL under threat of severe sanction. The penalty for breaking the FBI gag order is a crime punishable by imprisonment for not more than five years and/or a fine of not more than $250,000 (not more than $500,000 for an organization). 

PRISM uncovers information such as:

• The identity of sender(s) and receiver(s) of digital communications and their circle of friends and colleagues who would become objects of spying.
• Reveal time-stamped locations, movements and routes and to parse information that could identify more colleagues and organizations related to sender and receiver and spy on them for additional profiling.
• Time-stamp digital communications with beginning, end and interruptions of the data stream 
• Analyse business transactions and personal purchases 
• Identify the computer and other devices used in the digital communication plus analyse that meta-information
• Identify and parse the communication network(s) used
• Can compare repetitive communications and analyse the meta-data
• Learn lots more about the sender(s) and receiver(s) 

A follow-up article will show how PRISM would profile Jane, a fictional American and how much that surveillance exercise would learn about her.