Californians Must Know What NSA Spies Know About Us

President Obama is going to Hiroshima.

When the president travels to Japan later this month for a G-7 summit meeting, he will visit a memorial site that honors the memory of those killed in 1945 when President Harry Truman made the decision to use the atomic bomb to end World War II in the Pacific.

It’s a reminder that the fearsome power of the United States government is under the control of elected civilians.

The atomic bomb was new in 1945, but the structure that controlled its use dates to the 18th century. The U.S. Constitution gives the power to declare war — and to spend or withhold funds for it — not to military leaders or intelligence professionals but to Congress. The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, outranking everyone in uniform even if he (or she) never served in the military personally.

The design was intended to ensure that the American people control the U.S. government, and not the other way around.

barack obama nsa phone verizonThat’s why the information that has come to light about the National Security Agency’s secret data collection programs is so troubling. In the name of keeping the American people safe from terrorist attacks, the U.S. government has been collecting and saving the email and Internet activity records of innocent Americans and allowing government agents to search the data without a warrant.

Congress is asking questions, and not getting answers.

Sometime next year, lawmakers will have to decide whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act, which is set to expire. The law has allowed the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence to intercept the communications of targeted foreign nationals, but it turns out that data from Americans has been swept up in the process.

How many Americans have had their emails and Internet activity records collected by this warrantless surveillance? The Obama administration won’t say. Last month 14 lawmakers from both parties sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper demanding an answer, but Clapper would only say he’s looking at “several options” for providing the information, “none of which are optimal.”

In a recent hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee, senators were told that the intelligence agencies are ignoring the required “minimization” procedures, which call for the communications of innocent Americans to be deleted when discovered.

But a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the information is never deleted. “It sits in the databases for five years, or sometimes longer,” board chairman David Medine told the senators, and the program “does not just target terrorists” but anyone with “foreign intelligence value.”

Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, expressed concern over the government’s “backdoor searches” of the collected data. Without a warrant, just by filing a “query,” government agents can read every private word.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, of California, insisted that the surveillance program has helped U.S. authorities foil terrorist plots. She said the government should declassify more reports so the public can see the value of the law.

That’s really not enough. The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and requires the government to get warrants. That constitutional right can’t simply be erased by a couple of declassified reports declaring the usefulness of warrantless searches.

If Congress doesn’t get answers to all its questions, lawmakers shouldn’t hesitate to let Section 702 fade into the sunset.

The power of the U.S. government is too great to be uncontrolled.

CA bans state cooperation with warrantless spying

From new regulations on ride-sharing to a ban on plastic bags, Californians lost plenty of liberty this legislative session. But freedom in the Golden State scored at least one small victory in 2014.

Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed into law a bipartisan bill that would ban the state from cooperating with warrantless spying by the federal government.

Senate Bill 828, co-authored by Sens. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, and Joel Anderson, R-Alpine, would ban state officials from complying with a federal agency’s request for electronic data if the state knows that request is illegal or unconstitutional. The bill is a response to the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance programs that collected phone and electronic data on millions of American citizens.

Lieu stands up for 4th Amendment

Dubbed the 4th Amendment Protection Act, the bill sailed through both houses of the Legislature without opposition.

“I commend Gov. Brown for recognizing that the National Security Agency’s massive and indiscriminate collecting of phone and electronic data on all Americans, including more than 38 million Californians, is a threat to our liberty and freedom,” Lieu said. “We can only hope the feds halt this illegal and unconstitutional practice nationally.”

Supporters of the bill, which include the American Civil Liberties Union of California, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the Consumer Federation of California, say that the new law is a symbolic victory for constitutional principles.

“The federal government’s dragnet collection of millions of phone records and metadata is very troubling,” said CAIR-Sacramento Valley Executive Director Basim Elkarra. “We are happy to see California leading the way in pushing back against the unconstitutional data collection by the NSA and ensuring the observance of the Fourth Amendment, as a basic principle of this nation’s founding and democratic values.”

Orwellian technology exposed by Snowden

As CalWatchdog.com first reported in January, Lieu’s legislation comes in response to last summer’s revelations by former defense contractor and government whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been collecting phone data on millions of Americans. In December, a federal judge ruled that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records is likely unconstitutional.

“The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,” Judge Richard Leon wrote in his December ruling.

California’s new law covers “electronically stored information,” which is any data stored in a digital form, as well as the metadata surrounding any communication. Metadata is the “data about data” and can include the time, date, location, duration, origin or identity of the persons. In many cases, such information can be as revealing as the content of a call or email itself.

“New technology is demonstrating just how sensitive metadata can be: how friend lists can reveal a person’s sexual orientation, purchase histories can identify a pregnancy before any visible signs appear, and location information can expose individuals to harassment for unpopular political views or even theft and physical harm,” the American Civil Liberties Union of California explained in its February 2014 white paper, “Metadata: Piecing Together a Privacy Solution.”

Feds occasionally rely on state for data

According to the legislative analysis, federal agencies occasionally rely “upon services provided by the state and/or private entities that provide services on behalf of the state” in order to illegally collect data.

“SB 828 makes clear that the state of California will continue to uphold the Fourth Amendment rights of its citizens, even under pressure from the federal government,” said Anderson, the Republican coauthor of the bill. “Our nation is unequivocally dedicated to stopping terrorism, yet we must be ever vigilant that our desire for safety does not come at the expense of the freedoms and liberty our enemies seek to destroy.”

The new law, which is less than 200 words in length, is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2015. Here’s the text of the bill:

Senate Bill 828: 4th Amendment Protection Act

The state shall not provide material support, participation, or assistance in response to a request from a federal agency or an employee of a federal agency to collect the electronically stored information or metadata of any person if the state has actual knowledge that the request constitutes an illegal or unconstitutional collection of electronically stored information or metadata.

This article originally appeared on CalWatchdog.com