“Who Else Is Watching Me, Besides The NSA? What Are They Doing With My Information?”

June 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, who co-authored the “What They Know” series about surveillance for the Wall Street Journal, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

I’m as frustrated as anybody with what the government is doing. But i also know we need to be vigilant in trying to track and find out what real terrorists are doing. How can we strike the right balance between privacy and fighting against terrorism?

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

I might end up giving this answer a lot. But I think transparency is the key first step.

We can’t, as a society, decide if we agree with something if we don’t even know what that “something” is.

A couple senators on the Intelligence committee have been saying for some time, rather loudly, that there is a “secret interpretation of the law” that should worry us all. Turns out that secret legal interpretation is what allows this massive gathering of phone record information and so forth.

Those senators had been asking to have the legal reasoning be declassified, but they weren’t able to effect that change.

To me, if you can’t even declassify the way our own laws are being interpreted, that’s a huge question for our system. That’s not about protecting troop movements or activities. It’s about whether we as citizens get to know what the law says.

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Question:

Who else is watching me, besides the NSA? What are they doing with my information?

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

It depends on who you are and what you mean by “watching.”But I’ll just tackle this broadly.Your data can be gathered with incredible ease. For the most part, the folks doing this are the companies who are providing you the services. Google, for example, sifts through Gmail to show you ads. As you know, the phone companies can get a lot of information about the “metadata” from your calls.Depending on the type of data and who is gathering it, some of it gets sent to companies called data brokers. These guys (Acxiom, for example, or Lexis Nexis) store a lot of data about you from private sources as well as public databases, like court and real estate records.

Right now, in terms of corporate tracking, this is done mostly to show advertising. But it’s also done to identify good customers and tell marketers about who desirable customers are.

I myself like getting targeted ads. The concern comes if companies are doing this to alter prices, especially for sensitive categories such as insurance. My fellow reporters and I had a story about this type of thing in December.

As for government tracking, law enforcement has the ability to track people pursuant to several authorities.

To get content (what you’re actually saying), they get a Title III wiretap warrant, which requires probable cause as well as minimization of extraneous content and other things.

Law enforcement also can get things like email metadata pursuant to a lesser court order, which requires going before a judge and showing “specific and articulable facts.”

The lowest type of court order, called a “pen register trap and trace” order, provides things like phone metadata. For that, investigators just have to show that it’s relevant to an ongoing investigation. They aren’t supposed to use that authority to track you.

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Question:

How concerned are the conservative and Tea Party groups about and the widespread phone and internet searches and the loss of privacy?When there was the gun control debate after Sandy Hook, these organizations were enraged about the encroachment on the 2nd Amendment, do they care that the 4th Amendment is now under attack?

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

The only thing I know about the Tea Party is from my family back in Texas, and they seem concerned. Sample size of two, though!However, I’ve also heard conservative commentators come out in favor of this surveillance.One of the things I think is so interesting about this issue of surveillance is that it doesn’t always break neatly on party lines. It has now been promoted by two administrations that are different politically. And it has now been assailed by people on both sides of the spectrum as well.•

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