LA Times editorial: "NSA's metadata program: End it, don't mend it"

[851-977]

By The Times editorial board
November 5, 2013

Five months after Americans learned that information about their telephone calls was being indiscriminately scooped up by the National Security Agency, Congress seems poised to place limits on the bulk collection of telephone "metadata" — information about the source, destination and duration of telephone calls but not their contents. That's a positive development.

But there is a world of difference between the legislation approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would make only minor improvements in the program, and a superior proposal by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) that would bring the collection of phone records into compliance with the letter and the spirit of the 4th Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Intelligence Committee, rightly says that the committee's bill "increases privacy protections and public transparency" in the phone records program. But the protections are minimal, and in return for the minor changes, Congress would give its explicit approval for the wholesale acquisition of metadata by the government. By contrast, the Leahy-Sensenbrenner bill would allow the government to acquire phone data only as part of an investigation tied to a specific suspected terrorist or foreign agent or an individual in contact with him. Bulk collection would end.

More: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-nsa-feinstein-lahey-sensenbrenner-20131105,0,3426125.story#axzz2joEdf1ZH

[Blue_Tires]

1. Thank you...

I've been screaming from the start that there's not going to be any "fix" for the NSA short of complete elimination...

[riderinthestorm]

2. The LATimes hasn't gotten the message from DU's NSA brigade that this is NOTHING

"Just" metadata!!!111!!!

Nothing to see here. No big deal. Everyone does it. Snowden traitor. Greenwald attention hound!!11!!!!

Clearly the LA Times doesn't know what its talking about.



Welcome to DU by the way!

[JDPriestly]

3. K&R.

Bulk collection should end. It is a waste.

[bvar22]

4. This National Leader agrees!

Has anyone seen that defender of our liberties and protections lately?

[Tarheel_Dem]

5. Welcome Back!

[WillyT]

6. HUGE K & R !!!

[jsr]

7. Kill it dead.

[randome]

8. The right questions first need to be asked.

How many instances per year does the NSA need to pull numbers from the metadata? Is it hundreds? If so, forbidding them from keeping copies of the metadata would effectively end those type of investigations.

Will the telecoms continue to maintain their own copies of the metadata? Of course.

Would it make sense for the NSA to run around to every telecom in the country to look up a number? Or would they have some type of automated transmission agreement with the telecoms? Which is what they do, in fact, have now.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]The truth doesn’t always set you free.
Sometimes it builds a bigger cage around the one you’re already in.[/center][/font][hr]

[delrem]

9. Correct. End it, don't pretend to amend it.

How do you "mend" 100% surveillance, with 10's of billions spent on it and growing exponentially because it is *that* powerful?
When the whole world is under 100% surveillance the quanta have to be "meta", meaning that whatever software that big money decides to build will be dealing with "meta-data", which is already powerful just on its own but is that to the infinite power when interfacing with total data dumps.