Last week, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined President Barack Obama
in congratulating themselves for taming the National Security Agency’s voracious
appetite for spying. By permitting one section of the Patriot Act to expire
and by replacing it with the USA Freedom Act, the federal government is taking
credit for taming beasts of its own creation.
In reality, nothing substantial has changed.
Under the Patriot Act, the NSA had access to and possessed digital versions
of the content of all telephone conversations, emails and text messages sent
between and among all people in America since 2009. Under the USA Freedom Act,
it has the same. The USA Freedom Act changes slightly the mechanisms for acquiring
this bulk data, but it does not change the amount or nature of the data the
NSA acquires.
Under the Patriot Act, the NSA installed its computers in every main switching
station of every telecom carrier and Internet service provider in the U.S. It
did this by getting Congress to immunize the carriers and providers from liability
for permitting the feds to snoop on their customers and by getting the Department
of Justice to prosecute the only CEO of a carrier who had the courage to send
the feds packing.
In order to operate its computers at these facilities, the NSA placed its own
computer analysts physically at those computers 24/7. It then went to the U.S.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and asked for search warrants directing
the telecoms and Internet service providers to make available to it all the
identifying metadata — the times, locations, durations, email addresses used
and telephone numbers used — for all callers and email users in a given ZIP
code or area code or on a customer list.