Government spying needs to be debated

Congress was quick following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to authorize aggressive powers for President George W. Bush’s administration to engage in surveillance at a level that eroded Americans’ right to privacy.

President Barack Obama once was correctly critical of such policies, but now has not only embraced but expanded the National Security Agency program called Prism that was recently renewed by Congress. His present defense of the broad data mining is both alarming and unacceptable.

"You can’t have 100 percent security and then also 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," Obama said, stressing that members of Congress from both parties and federal judges know about the efforts. "You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society."

However, society has been largely unaware of the vast extent to which the government has secretly collected information from huge technology and communications companies like Google, Apple and Verizon.

Classified documents obtained by The Washington Post and London’s The Guardian reveal that under Prism, the NSA and Federal Bureau of Investigation collected online data including email, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and log-ins. Several Internet companies strongly deny knowledge of, or participation in, the program.

This revelation of online tapping into the servers of the U.S.’s seven leading Internet firms came less than a day after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort that swept up records of telephone calls within the U.S..

A 2008 law reauthorized last year allows the government to sweep America’s emails and phone calls without a specific court order when they communicate with people overseas. Several companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, negotiated to provide the government with technical means to provide specific data in response to court orders.

Obama maintains that the activity is above board because Congress not only has authorized it but is "continually briefed" and "federal judges are overseeing the entire program throughout." Of course, the congressional briefings are behind closed doors and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court is itself secret, with hearings and records of the proceedings unavailable to the public.

The president responds that people would be at risk if such information was "dumped out willy-nilly" by the media "without regard to risks to the program." But people have reason to be angry to learn that the federal government has collected information about all phone calls in America, albeit not the conversations themselves.

Soon after Obama made his remarks, The Guardian published online a copy of the classified directive that he signed last year that lays out the conditions under which the president — and only the president — can order cyberstrikes against another country.

The overreach by officials under the cloak of national security needs to be publicly debated and likely reined back, if Americans have any hope of preventing further and more egregious abuses. Even U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the Republican who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, on Thursday criticized government: "Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."

He said in a statement: "As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation. While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses."

Obama suggests that Americans should trust Congress and federal judges "to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law."

But really, Mr. President, it is asking too much for citizens to be left in the dark while certain officials, members of Congress and federal judges have vowed to keep such widespread private information to themselves.