Welcome to the Age of Unlimited Government!

Welcome to the Age of Unlimited Government!



Posted Tuesday, October 1st 2013 @ 9am by Nick Gillespie

It’s a telling coincidence that the latest scandalous revelation about the National Security Agency (NSA) is hitting the front pages just as the enrollment period specified by the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare) is getting started.

Each of these things underscores different but related aspects of the virtually unlimited state that has ruined the peaceful slumber of libertarian-minded Americans for decades. Whether we’re talking about surveilling citizens without any sort of serious legal oversight or forcing them to participate in economic activity in the name of healthcare über alles, the answer always seems to favor the growth and power of the state to control more and more aspects of our lives. Is it any wonder that a record-high percentage of Americans think the federal government is too powerful?

In an explosive story, The New York Times detailed the ways in which the NSA, which was originally supposed to spy on communications among foreign agents and provide intelligence on threats posed by non-citizen actors and governments, is increasingly focused on domestic activities. Since 2010, according to an NSA memo obtained by the Times, “The agency was authorized [by officials in the Obama administration] to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier.”

Through a process known as “contact chaining,” the NSA is able to suck up all sorts of email addresses, phone numbers, social media network information, and more without regard to the physical location or citizenship of each data point. The agency, reports the Times, then “enriches” that metadata “with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information,” and more. The result, as George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr puts it, is “the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

The only restriction on the practice appears to be that the NSA must make a claim that their data-gathering serves a foreign-policy justification. Which is never a problem for the agency since, as a spokesperson told the Times, “All of NSA’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose.” While it’s clear that the contact chaining results in vast webs of information that rope in Americans completely uninvolved in terrorism, the NSA refuses to divulge any relevant numbers or incidents.

The NSA originally sought such unrestricted use of metadata and other information involving Americans back in 1999 but was rebuffed due to concerns that it was not legal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which governs the agency. Legal opinions within presidential administrations—and after the 9/11 attacks—change, though, and there’s some indirect evidence that the NSA may have engaged in contact chaining during the Bush years. Despite his stated interest in protecting civil liberties, Barack Obama has disappointed even his staunchest defenders when it comes to constitutional limits on executive power and the surveillance state. Indeed, he has upped the ante from the Bush administration by claiming not simply the right to hold U.S. citizens indefinitely without charging them but the right to unilaterally kill them.

Read The Full Article On The Daily Beast

Read more: http://www.schnittshow.com/articles/politics-104707/welcome-to-the-age-of-unlimited-11699282/#ixzz2gX6KBOW6