The Specious Argument Tide Is In
Richard A. Falkenrath, the former deputy homeland security advisor and current Brookings Institute scholar, has published an editorial in the Post saying that whoever engineered the massive NSA phone-record grab is a genius and a hero. And if that person turn out to be Michael Hayden, erstwhile NSA head honcho and CIA Director nominee, he should be immediately confirmed, because he’s just the kind of guy we want heading our intelligence agencies.
His argument, such as it is, wends its way through a carefully-worded, legalistic labyrinth before fetching up on the shoals of the traditional we’re at war, anything goes shibboleth. One of his attempted sleights of hand centers around the word “anonymized”, which appears five times in the course of a 670-word op-ed. As in:
On Thursday, USA Today reported that three U.S. telecommunications companies have been voluntarily providing the National Security Agency with anonymized domestic telephone records — that is, records stripped of individually identifiable data, such as names and place of residence.
It’s a good thing there’s absolutely no way to trace phone numbers back to their owners, isn’t it? Say, through a Google search, maybe, or some other service that, given a phone number, provides instantaneous name and address data. Otherwise, those anonymized records wouldn’t be anonymous at all, and that would be terrible for the point that Mr Falkenrath is trying to make. Just terrible.
Setting that aside for the moment, there’s also the repeated use of “voluntarily.” This also appears five times. As in:
The USA Today story, however, alleges that three telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth — provided it voluntarily. How else could one company (Qwest) decline to provide the information? Since there is no prohibition against federal agencies receiving voluntarily provided business records relating to their responsibilities, it appears that the NSA’s alleged receipt and retention of such information is perfectly legal.
So an NSA agent shows up at your door. He says, Hi! I’d like phone records for every call that’s ever been made on your network, ever. No pressure, of course, I’m not demanding anything, but there is the matter of national security, and the fact that you have several regulatory issues wending their way through our pet congress, and, oh! here’s a bunch of money!
The fact that Qwest told these people to get lost is a testament to their courage, not to the legality of the request. Even if this is somehow legal, in the narrowest and most legalistic sense, it’s morally repugnant, and an obvious violation of the spirit of the law intended to keep the government out of our lives.
We’re going to hear a lot of arguments like this one over the next few weeks, so it’s important to keep our eye on the ball: the NSA now has possession of most of our phone records. They’re sitting in a database somewhere, being data-mined as we speak.
This is as Big Brotherish as it gets. This is real. This is happening.
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