higher. For “security” reasons no one in Congress or the agencies will say. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has access to the number of searches but is legally not permitted to reveal that number, estimates it to be in the “gazillions,” thereby giving a sense of the magnitude without risking jail since, as he points out, gazillion is not a real number. Truth is, when you use your car, make a call on your smart phone, or use your toaster (for all I know) massive amounts of your personal data are collected by the private sector. There is no doubt that the CIA and NSA need tools to undertake legitimate surveillance activities. The intersection of technology, philosophy, and policy is complex, to say the least. Seek out tech-savvy analysts who have a primary focus on liberty. (I like Patrick Eddington at Cato, and Jim Harper at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.) Truth is, when you use your car, make a call on your smart phone, or use your toaster (for all I know) massive amounts of your personal data are collected by the private sector. Facebook and Google are threats to privacy, but primarily through their willingness to cooperate with government. Still, if North Korea can hack a major movie studio and Russia can hack into the Winter Olympics (not to mention U.S. elections) we’re dealing with a serious problem. One thing we do know is that the solution is unlikely to come from government. Or, for that matter, Google or Facebook. Right now some socially
sure, there have been huge gains for women, blacks, gays, and other minorities, but they, too, have been swept up in the arbitrary diktats of the state, whether being spied upon, forced to support a bloated military budget, denied due process in the criminal justice system, or putting up with sophomoric political correctness on college campuses. The surveillance state is not what the Framers had in mind. In 1789 Jefferson wrote to a friend, “There are rights which it is useless to surrender to the government, and which yet, governments have always been fond to invade. These are the rights of thinking, and publishing our thoughts by speaking or writing... the right of personal freedom.” The so-called Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) are unconstitutional without repealing the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which pretty much anticipated what the political class would be up to down the road. The infamous Section 702 of FISA grants the feds the right to spy on foreign communications that cross into the United States, and to do so without a warrant or the approval of a judge if a broadly-defined claim of “foreign intelligence” investigation is attached. Those communications often include U.S. citizens who are then swept into an enormous database to be used (illegally) for “backdoor searches” whenever the feds feel the urge. The urge seems to come more frequently these days. It has been estimated that as recently as 2016 the CIA and NSA used that database to conduct some 30,000 searches for information on U.S. citizens. The actual number is possibly an order of magnitude
32 March 2018
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker