Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Two years later Americans began to learn what Senator Wyden was talking about.
On June 5, 2013, the British newspaper the Guardian revealed that based on a request
from the FBI, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had ordered Verizon to
provide to the National Security Agency on a daily basis records of all of its customers'
calls from April 25, 2013, to July 19, 2013 [58]. (Edward Snowden, a former employee
of NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, was responsible for leaking the information to
the Guardian .) These call records, also called telephony metadata , included the date and
time of each telephone call, the location of the phone making the call, the duration of
the conversation, and “other identifying information.” Verizon was not asked to provide
the contents of the conversations. The order from the FISC expressly prohibited Verizon
from revealing to the public the FBI's request for this information. Opined the Guardian ,
“These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from
an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses
increasingly on domestic communications” [58].
The Obama administration downplayed the revelation. Deputy Press Secretary Josh
Earnest said that the court orders for telephone records “are something that have been
in place a number of years now” [59]. Diane Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, confirmed that position: “As far as I know, this is an exact three-month
renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years” [60].
Senator Udall said, “this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us
and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking”
[61]. Former Vice President Al Gore called the blanket order “obscenely outrageous”
[61]. Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot
Act, added, “I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the
requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people
is excessive and un-American” [61].
6.7 Regulation of Public and Private Databases
In this section we switch our focus to the information-processing category of Solove's
taxonomy of privacy. (Our coverage of issues related to information-processing and the
government continues through Section 6.9.)
Once organizations have collected information, they can manipulate and use it in a
variety of ways, and some of these uses have privacy implications. We begin by describing
the social conditions that led to the creation of the Code of Fair Information Practices
and the passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. We then move on to legislation that regulates
databases managed by private organizations.
6.7.1 Code of Fair Information Practices
In 1965 the Director of the Budget commissioned a consulting committee, composed
largely of economists, to look at problems caused by the decentralization of statistical
data across many federal agencies. The Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
the Statistical Reporting Service, and the Economic Research Service of the Department
 
 
 
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