The New York Times reports this today:
The National Security Agency's dominant role as the nation's spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say.Wait -- what? The NSA is collecting all this information, but its use by other agencies might violate Americans' privacy rights? As if the collection itself is perfectly harmless to Americans' privacy rights, and the opening up of the data vault on the basis of warrants by a rubber-stamp secret court is also perfectly harmless, but allowing access to the data on the basis of other kinds of warrants, obtained via procedures that aren't secret and are subject to real scrutiny, would be a real problem?
Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agency's vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say.
Intelligence officials say they have been careful to limit the use of the security agency's troves of data and eavesdropping spyware for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans' privacy rights....
Other agencies do get access sometimes, but they have to demonstrate that what they ant the information for is terrorism-related, and sometimes they're denied even then:
Smaller intelligence units within the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have sometimes been given access to the security agency's surveillance tools for particular cases, intelligence officials say.I say screw it. Either you're violating our privacy by hoovering all this information up or you aren't. Hoovering it up and stamping it "FOR THE PREVENTION OF TERRORISM ONLY" (or, more likely, "FOR USES APPROVED BY THE NSA ONLY, BECAUSE WE LOVE FIGHTING TURF BATTLES") doesn't make the hoovering any less intrusive.
But more often, their requests have been rejected because the links to terrorism or foreign intelligence, usually required by law or policy, are considered tenuous....
At the drug agency, for example, officials complained that they were blocked from using the security agency's surveillance tools for several drug-trafficking cases in Latin America, which they said might be connected to financing terrorist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere....
If you're going to collect all this, make it accessible to anyone with a valid warrant. I say that after hearing this story on the radio yesterday:
Monday, the FBI announced the success of a three-day, multicity child sex trafficking operation. The seventh and largest of its kind, the raid recovered 106 teenagers and arrested 152 pimps. Aged 13 to 17, almost all of the young people found were girls.I bet NSA data could have been beneficial in this case, at least if some of the relevant information went through offshore Web sites and servers. Is terrorism the worst thing in the world? I'm sorry, but I think it's a photo finish in a race between, say, the Boston bombing and the ongoing violent sexual exploitation of hundreds of teenagers for profit.
... The trade itself is not new, but the digital age is changing the tactics used by both pimps and law enforcement.
John Ryan is CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children...
"Up until about five years ago, sex trafficking of both adults and children were occurring in traditional venues, like street corners and alleys, bus stops," he tells NPR's Jacki Lyden. "The Internet has changed all that, particularly through social media platforms."
Sifting through those online channels was critical to the recent operation. During the FBI raids, the organization's office functioned like a command center, analyzing data gathered from the Internet....
I think NSA data collection is out of control. But either curtail it or use allow access to it by any agency with a warrant that can do a serious amount of good with it.
