---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 8:02 AM
Subject: re: This Week, Mass Surveillance Wins
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  It is widely conceded that our federal laws on surveillance need reform. In places, they are self-contradictory, in places they violate our constitution and they are vague throughout. But clearer legislation cannot be the whole fix. Enacting better laws where there is no enforcement is like tuning the engine of a car that has no wheels; the rubber doesn't meet the road.

   This paper documented a pattern of criminal violations of the FISA statute of 1979, wiretapping Americans without search warrants. Yet neither the DoJ of President Bush nor that of president Obama have "take[n] care that these Laws be faithfully executed".  

   No one or two branches of government will get us through this crisis. The balance of liberty and security must engage all three branches and the electorate. Or our republic is lost.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/opinion/this-week-mass-surveillance-wins.html?_r=0

EDITORIAL

This Week, Mass Surveillance Wins

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: December 27, 2013 178 Comments

• 
  
• 
  

Has the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records actually helped to prevent terrorist attacks?

• 
  

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

No, according to the 300-page report issued this month by a panel of legal and intelligence experts appointed by President Obama.

Yet in a rulingissued on Friday, Judge William Pauley III of the Federal District Court in Manhattan came to the opposite conclusion. “The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed,” Judge Pauleywrote in a deeply troubling decisiondismissing a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenged the constitutionality of the N.S.A.’s bulk data collection program.

The ruling, which repeatedly defers to the government’s benign characterization of its own surveillance programs, demonstrates once more the importance of fixing the law at its source, rather than waiting for further interpretations by higher courts.

Judge Pauley’s opinion largely disregards the concerns central to the presidential panel’s report and the ruling on Dec. 16 by a federal district judge in Washington, Richard Leon, who found that the agency’s program was “significantly likely” to be unconstitutional.

The government’s claim that the program is constitutional rests on a 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which held that a robbery suspect had no expectation of privacy — and no Fourth Amendment protection — in the telephone numbers he dialed. Judge Leon found the Smith decision to be inapplicable to a daily, indiscriminate sweep of hundreds of millions of phone records. Judge Pauley, however, said its logic still applied.

Judge Pauley’s opinion is perplexing in its near-total acceptance of the claim by the government that it almost always acts in accordance with the law and quickly self-corrects when it does not. For example, Judge Pauley said the N.S.A.’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, was being “crystal clear” when he responded to charges that the agency was mining data from phone calls by saying: “We’re not authorized to do it. We aren’t doing it.”

That shows an alarming lack of skepticism, particularly in light of the testimony of James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who falsely told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting any type of data at all on hundreds of millions of Americans.

It is also incorrect to say, as Judge Pauley does, that there is “no evidence” that the government has used the phone data for anything other than terrorism investigations. An inspector general’s report in September revealed at least a dozen instances in which government employees used the databases for personal purposes.

The presidential panel made many good recommendations to reform both the surveillance law and the intelligence court that rules on government surveillance requests. Congress and Mr. Obama should adopt as many of these as possible. Court rulings will not suffice to rein in an agency that continues to take advantage of the law’s vague and malleable standards
.