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Jonathan Feldman<\/strong> Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed Thursday that the U.S. government has been secretly collecting information since 2007, exploiting backdoor access to the systems and data of major Internet and tech companies in search of national security threats. That NSA dragnet, revealed by The Washington Post and The Guardian and code-named PRISM, reportedly taps into user data from Facebook, Google, Apple and other U.S.-based companies. (Those providers have mostly denied that the NSA has such backdoor access.)<\/p>\n If news of the NSA dragnet is true \u2013 and it\u2019s hard to believe at this point that it\u2019s not \u2013 it\u2019s hard to justify combing through all of the providers\u2019 data and records without a specific due process. One contributor to Forbes.com, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, thinks it\u2019s a capital idea: \u201cThis is in fact what governments are supposed to do, so I\u2019m at something of a loss in understanding why people seem to be getting so outraged about it.\u201d<\/p>\n I strongly disagree. While Clapper\u2019s release states that surveillance is \u201csubject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch and Congress\u201d and must be \u201cspecifically approved by the court to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted,\u201d the release also acknowledges that information about U.S. persons could be acquired in this dragnet. The release states that such acquisition, retention and dissemination of \u201cincidental\u201d findings about citizens will be minimized, but surely there are other, more nuanced ways to catch bad guys.<\/p>\n Read more<\/a><\/p>\n <!– <\/p>\n –><\/p>\n This article was posted: Friday, June 7, 2013 at 8:39 pm<\/p>\n Tags: big brother<\/a>, domestic spying<\/a>, technology<\/a><\/p>\n
InformationWeek<\/a>
June 7, 2013<\/p>\n
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