newyorker | Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from liberal Northern California and the
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, assured the
public earlier today that the government’s secret snooping into the
phone records of Americans was perfectly fine, because the information
it obtained was only “meta,” meaning it excluded the actual content of
the phone conversations, providing merely records, from a Verizon
subsidiary, of who called whom when and from where. In addition, she
said in a prepared statement, the “names of subscribers” were not
included automatically in the metadata (though the numbers, surely,
could be used to identify them). “Our courts have consistently
recognized that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this
type of metadata information and thus no search warrant is required to
obtain it,” she said, adding that “any subsequent effort to obtain the
content of an American’s communications would require a specific order
from the FISA court.”
She said she understands privacy—“that’s why this is carefully
done”—and noted that eleven special federal judges, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, had authorized
the vast intelligence collection. A White House official made the same
points to reporters, saying, “The order reprinted overnight does not
allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls” and was
subject to “a robust legal regime.” The gist of the defense was that, in
contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of
secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had
authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual
words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad
could it be?
The answer, according to the mathematician and
former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while
reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s worse than many might think.
“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about
so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She
explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary
information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can
track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the
content.”
