Despite a vast selection of elected US officials from both parties and an outsized portion of the US media who have accepted the assurances from the Obama administration and the National Security Agency that the domestic spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden are someone “legal” under US statute, two legal scholars penned a sharply worded New York Times op-ed on Friday demanding better attention must be paid to the reality of what the disclosures truly show and that the programs be described as what they are: “criminal.”
Jennifer Stisa Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and law professor Christopher Jon Sprigman from the University of Virginia contend in their article, The Criminal NSA, that those supportive of government claims are simply “wrong” and that what we know about the programs is that they betray both “the letter and the spirit of federal law” designed to protect US citizens from government snooping of their private communications.
“No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance,” they write.
“Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.”
Looking specifically at the two most damning revelations reported on by the Guardian newspaper so far—the vast collection of cell phone “metadata” from nearly all US citizens and the Prism program, which allows for vast collection of internet communication data from some of the online platforms most used by Americans—the two legal experts say that in both cases the NSA has employed “shockingly flimsy” legal arguments to defend their practices.
“It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.”
Discussing the collection of telephone communications, they explain:
And regarding the Prism program, which the NSA has claimed authority to operate under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Granick and Sprigman say the NSA has reached out far beyond the already broad authority granted it.
The answer again, they write: It doesn’t. Though defended by National Security Director James Clapper, the experts quip that “if there’s a law against torturing the English language,” it’s Clapper who should be in “real trouble.”
And what’s worse, writes The Nation’s Jonathan Schell, is that what Americans until recently assumed unthinkable has now become commonplace:
And Granick and Sprigman express how the US government has made a “mockery” of both the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings designed to protect US privacy.
“The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance,” they explain. However, the continue, “There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.”
And conclude:
______________________________________________