Joanna
----- Original Message -----
I don't think the comments so far reflect an understanding of why this NSA surveillance is important to stop. The ACLU seems to get it.
Let's say you have helped organize a relatively effective demonstration and had some small impact on local issues. Let's say the political office holders are pissed off and want these activities stopped, even though they are precisely what constitutes the political life of a community like zoning for commercial development, environmental impact, police policies, voting systems, whatever the issue.
So now do you see the problem? Probably not. Local police need some background on you to help them stop your organizing or discredit it or make arrests that will stick. They can call DOHS because they have a fed grants and are entitled to assistance. The whole Occupy movement very quickly produced a uniform response that seemed to me to be nationally coordinated.
The NSA is an information resource for government agencies (and corporate interest), who are customers for their products. Background profiles and personal networks of contact seem to me to be some of their basic products. Boundless Informant produces these as routine SQLs. A few minutes to fill in a screen request and the report gets back to whoever wanted it.
So now Mister Police know what Mister Save-the-Square and his comrades are planning and who they contacted in your lovely community. I assume its modelled on the drug wars. Save-the-Square is broken up and a known pain in the ass was arrested. Go run him through the fed systems to see if there is anything on him, open warrants etc. More profiles come back of associates, organs he is associated with, etc. The FBI decides this whole little group are getting to be a headache. The Dept of Homeland Security was invented for exactly this purpose, a clearing house and central coordinating center to government information systems.
Somewhere along the way, Mr.STS is charged with a felony and so the prosecutor wants to build a case because of the profiles that look like a good catch. The Mister Law goes through the DOJ to set up a series of ongoing monitor reports to follow Mr.STS in all his electronic communication, emails, phones, locations, and contacts, including his/her lawyer and associates.
All of that is perfectly legal now and doesn't require any permission from a court and even if it did, a court isn't going to know about it, if the material is not germain to a case before a court, i.e the criminal charges by themselves.
You probably still don't see it. All of that is a profound violation of your political rights to effective speech and association, along with right to counsel and due process. And even if that doesn't bother you the reader, think about how that effects the lives and actions of people who you politically support and are high profile activists who organize and lead effective political speech and action.
The ACLU is suing because it finally has legal standing as a user of Verizon Business Networks or whatever it's called. Boundless Informant the NSA system is at the heart of this potential case, and that is a good thing to go after in the wars against political action.
I base my current views on this from the perspective of long ago draft resistance when the kind of wholesale information gathering and processing would have been a very big help in destroying the effectiveness of those activities, a goal the USG wanted to achieve and did as much as possible with all the legal and illegal means it had. The problems were essentially those of numbers. They couldn't get enough people in jail fast enough to stop it. The legal system was a bottleneck.
Modern technology combined with new law has solved the problem.
CG
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