Surveillance without oversight a danger to society
Michael Bochenek says Snowden has a case for public-interest defence
We owe a lot to Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who has exposed large-scale surveillance efforts in the US and worldwide. He has accomplished what the US Congress could not and the federal courts have refused to do. Far from committing an act of treason, as some have suggested, by all appearances he's done a public service.
Thanks to him, we now know about the secret court order compelling the telecoms company Verizon to disclose to the National Security Agency (NSA) information on all phone calls it handles. We also now know about the secret NSA programme Prism, which allows access to information in the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype and Apple, among others. And we know more about the ways the NSA is able, through its "Boundless Informant" initiative, to collate the information it mines.
There's no question that the programmes he exposed are matters of public interest
These disclosures reveal two trends in the US approach to intelligence - starting with the Bush administration, and augmented on President Barack Obama's watch.
First, when given the option of broad surveillance powers at home and abroad, US intelligence agencies have pushed it as far as possible. Why be constrained by the quaint concepts of following individual leads and demonstrating probable cause when they can instead sift through millions of telephone logs and plug directly into the servers of the e-mail and social networking platforms?
Second is the trend of state secrecy gone mad. The sweeping collection of phone "metadata" records was made possible by amendments in 2008 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which exempted such surveillance from oversight.
Thus, the government has no obligation to reveal whose communications it intends to monitor, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established by the act, has no role in reviewing how the government is using the information. Remarkably, even if the court finds the government's procedures deficient, the government can disregard those findings and continue surveillance while it appeals against the court's decision.