![]() ![]() This isn’t exactly a warrant it’s an order to turn over “tangible things” it refers to the Patriot Act, whose Section 215 allows the government to ask for “business records” that are “relevant” to an investigation, and that is what the government has decided to call these communication records. If the government wants access to an American citizen’s phone number because it thinks that person might be communicating with someone from Al Qaeda, and wants the warrant to be secret, it goes to FISA, which almost never turns it down. FISA’s purpose is to allow the government to investigate foreign threats in a way that harms the privacy of Americans as little as possible. How, one might ask, is this possibly legal? The answer involves an interaction of FISA and the Patriot Act. or any other agency.” The USA Today reported back then that something like this was going on, but the scale, legal sleight of hand, and its endurance under the Obama Administration are a surprise. An “expert in this aspect of the law” that the Washington Post spoke to said that the order appeared to be the descendant of one from 2006, “reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the F.B.I. That’s three months, a calendar increment that suggests it might be renewed regularly. The order covers the period from April 25th to July 19th of this year. How will that information not be a permanent temptation to overreaching investigators? (Beyond privacy rights, the location data has implications for freedom of assembly.) Nor do there appear to be provisions limiting who can see the data. There is also nothing in the order telling the government to destroy the records after a certain amount of time. Whatever complaints their customers may have, there is no reason to think that choosing Verizon is a tell-tale sign of one’s foreign-intelligence value.Įither the government, in the interest of looking for a couple of particular Verizon customers, decided to vacuum up the records of what could be millions of them or there are similar orders out there for other providers. ![]() And the customers of other providers shouldn’t be reassured: it is likely that this order is simply one of a type-the one that fell off the truck. reporters that the government thought were involved in the leaking of national-security information, though that would be bad enough-are on the table. All phone records-for any of the company’s customers, not just, say, A.P. The government seems to have a list of all the people that Verizon customers called and who called them how long they spoke and, perhaps-depending on how precise the cell-phone-tower information in the metadata is, where they were on a given day. The order raises some obvious questions, the largest being whether, judge or no judge, this looks like an outrageous breach of the privacy and rights of American citizens. Judge Roger Vinson signed the document, which also instructs Verizon not to tell anyone. That metadata doesn’t tell the government what was said, but gives it “comprehensive communications routing information,” such as the phone numbers at both ends of the call, equipment codes, the time of the call, and how long it lasted. This would give the National Security Agency millions of phone records. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |