| You're making two mistakes. One: you are confusing criminal law with intelligence. "hearsay" and "unproven" are criminal law concepts, used when the state wishes to deprive you of some of your rights, such as when you are being investigated or prosecuted. Two: you are representing "link to terrorist" as some sort of boolean condition when in fact it's multi-dimensional. EVERYBODY has links to terrorists. I call the neighborhood pizza store who has an owner that SMSs PeeWee Herman on a regular basis who visits the web site of a known supporter of Hamas. We're all linked to terrorists -- it's like the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon concept. The point of meta-analysis is to take all of that random noise and gather meaningful meta-data in order to pursue. Once the government becomes interested in me, personally, we start moving from intelligence to crime -- assuming I am a U.S. citizen. If I am a foreign citizen, then it's simply plain old intelligence-gathering. The weirdness is that multi-node transports now can cover areas of both criminal law and intelligence gathering, but the laws are all written for one or the other. There has to be some allowance for work in-between the two concepts. We have some precedence. It's legal, for instance, for authorities to search your trash without a warrant.There is no presumption of privacy when using computers owned by somebody else, such as your employer. There's a lot of legal work to be done in these areas. I want the government completely out of my life, but that ain't happening. In any society in which a strong contingent wants to control and shape every form of energy I use (to prevent global warming), then we've gone beyond the old days and are in new territory. The game now, from a libertarian viewpoint, is damage control. EDIT: I can see where we might have a misunderstanding. When you're concerned that tracking the types and messages from you is infringing on your rights, you're assuming that the government can identify you. I have no idea how NSA is doing its work, but the idea of signals intelligence is that people are just nodes. The association of the data with your identity is another subject entirely. (Of course, attributes about the node, such as location, occupation, religious history, etc. are fair game. Just not identification. Who you actually are is irrelevant.) |
The tenuous definition of'match' required by some of these customers is scary, two arabic surnames beginning with Al are assumed to have a 50% match for one agency, all chinese with the surname 'Ng' are the same person according to another!
I'm sure that somewhere in military intelligence somebody understands sifting for real patterns in this. But compared to the number of people who get refused loans, get extra security at airports or listed as 'persons of interest' the next time a child is abducted - all on the basis of a 6th degree of separation.