NSA official cites ‘stop and frisk’ in effort to explain searches of phone records
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/04/207478/nsa-official-cites-stop-and-frisk.html
NSA official cites stop and frisk in effort to explain searches of phone records
By Ali Watkins McClatchy Washington Bureau
Published: November 4, 2013
WASHINGTON
The general counsel of the National Security Agency on Monday compared the agencys telephone metadata collection program to the highly controversial stop-and-frisk practice used by law enforcement officers, saying the agency uses that same standard to choose which phone numbers to query in its database.
Its effectively the same standard as stop-and-frisk, Rajesh De said in an attempt to explain the evidentiary use of reasonable and articulable suspicion to identify which phone numbers to target from the agencys huge database of stored cellphone records.
De made the comment during a rare hearing of an obscure government body, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress created in 2004 to oversee the governments expanded intelligence collection operations but which until Monday had never held a substantive hearing.
Des comparison was perhaps unfortunate. Stop and frisk, after all, is the subject of its own string of controversies. A federal judge ruled in August that the New York City Police Department had used racial profiling in its stops and disproportionately targeted blacks and Latinos. Last month, a video of a Philadelphia police officer stopping and frisking a young black male went viral on YouTube. Complaints about stop and frisk have reached a crescendo among civil liberties groups. The American Civil Liberties Union recently said the practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops and privacy rights.