Hard numbers, chilling facts: What the government does with your data

I admit it — I’m suffering from Snowden fatigue. The sheer volume of revelations about how the surveillance industrial complex digs its blue latex-gloved fingers into every nook and cranny of our lives has me exhausted. And there seems to be no end in sight.

Take, for example, this week’s revelation that the NSA routinely scrapes address books from popular Webmail services, looking for connections. Per IDG News:

On a typical day, the NSA collects about 500,000 buddy lists and inboxes (which seems to refer to address books), according to the documents. But the number is also sometimes higher. On one representative day mentioned in the documents, the NSA gathered 444,743 Yahoo address books, 105,068 Hotmail contact lists and 82,857 address books from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from other providers for a total of 689,246.

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Or the revelations about Microsoft building backdoors into Skype for the spooks. Or the efforts to coerce encrypted email services into violating the privacy of hundreds of thousands of customers. I cannot articulate the differences between EgotisticalGoat, Erroneous Identity, or Epicfail, let alone the dozens of other perversely named spy programs.

The NSA nightmare — told through pictures

Fortunately, someone has built a life raft for those of us drowning in the tsunami of data about NSA spying. Last week the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank and advocacy group, published a remarkably clear breakdown called “What the Government Does with Americans’ Data.” It should be required reading for anyone who cares about what’s left of our Constitution, once the buffoons in our nation’s capital have stopped using it as confetti. There’s an 88-page report, a summary of the conclusions, chilling numbers to consider, and a handful of amazingly concise infographics. Start with the latter to get the gist, then go to the intro.

The tl;dr version: The NSA gathers a massive amount of information on people who are not in any way connected with any terrorist activity, then holds onto it for at least five years and often much longer. It also shares this information with 10 different federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and the FDA.

As one infographic explains, if the NSA happens to hoover up a U.S. citizen’s data along with that of suspected foreign evil doers, it will hold onto it for up to six years to analyze whether it contains “significant foreign intelligence information” or “evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed.”

In other words, if you get caught in a digital dragnet, the spooks will sift your data to see if you’ve been naughty. If you have, they send that information to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

So much for “we don’t spy on innocent Americans.” So much for “we’re only doing this to fight terrorism.” You can’t find evidence of illegal activity without spying on a ton of perfectly legal activity. You can’t claim to be fighting terrorism when you’re mostly chasing down drug dealers.

The NSA has turned your data into a weapon — used against you

The infographic made clear something that has been gnawing on my brain ever since the Snowden bombshells started detonating last May. This is not about keeping us safe from terrorism; this is about the modern police state using technology as its primary weapon. The NSA has become a de facto supercop — which is most definitely not part of its charter.

I began to recount the various cyber takedowns that have been splashed across the news over the last few years. There was the prosecution of the Stratfor hack, the turning of Anonymous’s Sabu into an FBI informant, the SWAT-style raid on Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload, the closure of the Silk Road black market. How many of these law enforcement actions got their start from data first intercepted by the NSA?

Last March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the police do not have the right to go door to door with drug-sniffing dogs until they find one where marijuana is being grown. This is what the NSA has become: a drug-sniffing dog. Only in this case, it’s sniffing millions of terabytes of Internet traffic and looking for any criminal activity, not just dope.

As Rachel Levinson-Waldman, primary author of the Brennan report, writes:

Of course, federal and state agencies must maintain databases to carry out legitimate governmental purposes… In addition, where law enforcement agencies have reasonable suspicion of possible criminal activity or intelligence components are acquiring information on foreign targets and activity, they must retain information to track investigations, carry out lawful intelligence functions, and ensure that innocent people are not repeatedly targeted.

History makes clear, however, that information gathered for any purpose may be misused. Across multiple administrations, individuals and groups have been targeted for their activism, and sensitive personal information has been exploited for both political and petty reasons. The combination of vastly increased collection of innocuous information about Americans, long-term retention of these materials, enhanced electronic accessibility to stored data, and expanded information-sharing exponentially increases the risk of misuse.

You might argue that this is a good thing, that the feds need all the help they can get in fighting crime. But it’s not what the folks who started this wacky experiment in country-making 237 years ago had in mind. They lived through an era where any armed official could enter your home and haul you off for any reason. That’s why we have the Fourth Amendment and concepts like probable cause and due process — or, at least, we used to.

Should the spooks be allowed to play supercop? Post your thoughts below or email them here: cringe@infoworld.com. Just remember: Someone else may be listening.

This article, “Hard numbers, chilling facts: What the government does with your data,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.