Here is an interesting article by Ira Winkler at Computerworld. I know it goes against my opinion of this issue, but when I see Bruce Schneier, Ira Winkler, Martin McKeay, and Alan Shimel all having alternate opinions, I have to make sure I have looked at this close enough.
I think Mr. Winkler has hit this harder from a legal standpoint than I have seen from most security professionals who have weighed in on this. And if you look at my post on this, you will see that my only real hangup with this program is that they did not search out warrants for this information. I have heard many legal arguments for and against this program. I am not a lawyer, but I have to say that many of the people making legal arguments defending this program have had to stretch a little to make their case. I really don’t know why this administration could not have gone to FISA with this. Maybe from the political side they knew they would get blasted by the media if they got warrants for this, and they hoped this would not get leaked if they did it on the sly. I just don’t know. I do know that that argument does not excuse it.
What I do know is that the more research I do on this, the more I see that the NSA is collecting mass quantities of data on what appears to be our citizens, and that is not good because it can be used for nefarious purposes. With the gathering of phone numbers and possibly gathering of Internet traffic from major carriers, it all gets to be just too much.
What I don’t agree with Mr. Winkler on is the allusion to Hitler or Stalin when concerning this current administration. I don’t think George Bush intends on using this for anything other than legitimate purposes. You can call me naive, but that is what I believe. However, I am not so naive that I believe there are no other people in the current administration or future administrations that would use this data outside of what the President intended, so it still makes it scary.
The one thing that still stops me from outright damning this whole NSA spying program is this: what else are we supposed to do? How can we catch these terrorists who are among us (and I think Mr. Winkler is being naive by not taking this threat seriously enough - “We have snakes in our midst, yet we are chasing a mythical beast with completely unreliable evidence”) without gathering intelligence in this way? I do not believe this evidence is useless. I think you gather whatever you can, and then you analyze it. I have never been, and I doubt I ever will be, and NSA analyst, so I am probably WAY over my head when going against Mr. Winkler on this. But if shredding through mass quantities of evidence yields results, then you have to defend it to some degree. Believe me when I say that if Mr. Winkler would show me that this is not true, then I would be more than willing to listen and change my mind if convinced.
Basically, no one I have read in the security field has proposed a better solution. It is very difficult to nail these scumbags down without some leeway in gathering evidence. As I have said, this is a different world, and we have to do things differently.
So I am riding the fence more than I was. I want to catch the terrorists, and I don’t know how else to do it, but I really am worried about the amount of evidence the government is gathering on me. I guess only time will tell which way I go on this.
[Update]: Listen to a podcast of this post. Please be patient for download.
Vet
