I'm a little bemused by so many people, especially politicans, freaking out over the "news" that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting data on phone calls and e-mails.
Hello! Anybody heard of The Patriot Act that authorized this? Years ago? Like under President George W. Bush? Anybody?? This data collection has been happening for some 7-8 years, and in case you can't count, that was before the first Obama presidential term.
The people who are freaking out a) don't understand databases, b) don't understand what is being collected and what isn't, and c) don't understand how this data is being used.
Let me start by explaining what is being collected and what isn't. What is being collected is phone numbers, dates, and length of calls. Names are not being collected (so somebody can't go in and search on, say, Angelina Jolie to see who she's been calling, unless they have her phone number. They'd still be doing the search illegally). Content is not being collected, so nobody can hear the actual call.
In order to access this data, the NSA has to have a case for searching it, and they have to have signoff from a judge to do so. They're not interested in randomly searching this massive amount of data, nor can they do so on a whim.
Now, about databases... some of the comments by politicians and others tells me they have absolutely no clue how databases work. If there is a suspicion that a terrorist in Afghanistan has been in contact with someone here in the US, but no one knows who that person is, then if you have the Afghan terrorist's phone number it's a simple matter to search a database to find who in the States he's been calling. It works the other way around as well. If the NSA suspects that someone here in the US may have ties to terrorists either here or overseas, they can search that person's phone records to find out who they have been calling. They still can't hear the content of the call (without doing a separate wiretap), but it would give them the evidence necessary to be able to ask for the wiretap. Police departments have been able to gather phone records for decades, but they have to know who their target is in order to ask for specific records.
But what if you don't know who the second party is? Then you need a way to be able to find that out. In order for the database to be useful at all, it has to include virtually all phone calls and e-mails, or it's worthless, since there's no way to know who the other person is to be able to filter out everyone who is innocent of any wrongdoing. If you knew who the other party was, you wouldn't need the database, see?
This is a little bit simplified example, but so everyone reading this will understand I'll go with it. Let's say the NSA wants to search on phone number 123-456-7890. That number is sitting in this huge database, along with your number and everybody else's. The search will pick up a record, check it for 123-456-7890, and if that number doesn't show up, the record is discarded. Then it picks up the next record, and so on and so on. If you're not on the list of people someone with the number 123-456-7890 called (or you called them), then your record is discarded and will never show up in the results. It's just data the search chunks through that it pays no attention to once it realizes it doesn't need it. Period.
So everybody just take a deep breath. I don't have an issue with the NSA collecting this data, as I assumed they were doing it anyway. Besides, on NCIS McGee pulls this stuff all the time, and he doesn't even need a judge to sign off on it.
