Stephen B. Wicker is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University and an expert on wireless networks and digital security. His book “Cellular Convergence and the Death of Privacy” will be published this summer by Oxford University Press. He comments on the National Security Agency’s collection of information from Verizon customers.
He says:
“These events point to the failure of our legal system to keep up with modern technology. In particular, current law is based on the increasingly blurred distinction between the content of communication and its metadata, a distinction which allows dramatic violations of user privacy without benefit of a warrant, or in this case, without even specifying the targets of the investigation. All Americans are being caught up in an enormous, secret fishing expedition for information that might, some day, prove useful to law enforcement.
“The design of cellular technology puts an immense amount of discretion in the hands of the service provider. The FISA Court order is apparently based on the business records provision of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT ACT. In testimony before Congress, Todd Hinnen, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, stated that ‘to date, no recipient of a FISA business records order has challenged the validity of the order or a non-disclosure requirement.’ If Verizon did not bother to contest these requests, its behavior is unconscionable and a violation of the trust its customers place in their service providers when they use, and pay for, cellular technology. Verizon's customers deserve to know how their service provider responded.
“It doesn’t have to be this way. One can expect this reckless behavior with personal data, data that reveals the beliefs, preferences, and actions of all our citizens, to lead to Internet-based technologies that will keep our personal information under our personal control, where it belongs.
“Finally, these events point to a failure in our national leadership. President Obama is clearly continuing the legal fictions of the Bush administration. In his first inaugural address, President Obama stated that, ‘as for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.’ He has apparently changed his mind.”
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