The Washington Post has a somewhat schizophrenic piece on General Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency and of the military Cyber Command. The piece starts with lauding Alexander for a few paragraphs but then goes into some rather unflattering details of what the man has been doing. The general's approach is to "collect it all" and it started not in the United States but in Iraq where the U.S. military was totally unable to control the insurgency and tried in vane to get ahead of the game with total spying:
[T]he NSA director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, wanted more than mere snippets. He wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.
“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official who tracked the plan’s implementation. “Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”
What is good for unsuccessfully fighting an insurgency in Iraq, as earlier in other places, must also be good for controlling U.S. citizens and the rest of the world. Thus the "collect it all" scheme was extended to the United States as well as the globe:
[A]s he did in Iraq, Alexander has pushed hard for everything he can get: tools, resources and the legal authority to collect and store vast quantities of raw information on American and foreign communications.
…
“He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA official and whistleblower. The continuation of Alexander’s policies, Drake said, would result in the “complete evisceration of our civil liberties.”
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[E]ven his defenders say Alexander’s aggressiveness has sometimes taken him to the outer edge of his legal authority.
Glenn Greenwald correctly points out that the phrase "outer edge of his legal authority" is Washington code for "clearly illegal".
But the "collect it all" philosophy is not only illegal. It is stupid and dangerous.
"Collect it all" makes the haystack bigger than it needs to be. It collects data that is certain to never be "relevant" in any criminal case. The bigger haystack makes it more difficult to find the needles. The program eats up huge resources which would likely be more effective if they would be spend elsewhere. All the money spend on it creates a lobby that will make it difficult to shift such resources.
It is also a huge danger to personal freedom. How long will it take until all that personal data will be searched during each and every job application? First for those who want to work for the NSA itself, then for all government jobs, then for the "important" industries and then for all positions. Some nerdy or angry tweet you made years ago may then exclude you from any well paying future position. How long until automatic "triggers" will be attached to the algorithms that sift through all the data? What consequences will it have if some "trigger" switches, for whatever reason, from your data? Will it immediately put you on some disposition matrix?
The NSA's "collect it all" attitude is not only illegal, a vast waste of public resources and dangerous to personal and political freedom. It is an invitation to abuse.
What general will withstand the urge to use this information if it could help him avoid a budget cut? What administration will NOT use the power this information gives to its political gains? What can be abused will be abused. And we all will be, one way or another, casualties of this.