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This is Why We Need Oversight!

Christina Drummond,
老澳门开奖结果 of Washingon
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January 30, 2007

老澳门开奖结果 v. NSA

On the eve of the 6th Circuit hearing for the 老澳门开奖结果 v. NSA case, we learn about , except this time it鈥檚 under the guise of the FBI and not the NSA. Evidently entire streams of information are being sucked up, to be mined later by data analysis techniques.

Data-mining algorithms enable the systematic profiling of all people, with the intent of mining the good apples from the bad. Yet, who tells the computer what a 鈥渂ad apple鈥 is? And, you need everyone鈥檚 data to search through 鈥 everyday lawful Americans and the actual terrorists. Is trampling the rights of everyone in this country absolutely necessary in order to find the few bad apples?

Such data mining expects that terrorists never change their behavior, or it requires a history of data to establish patterns over time. In my opinion, the government has absolutely no right to keep such ongoing tabs on lawful citizens, and I believe our founding fathers would have agreed.

In the 1960鈥檚 and 1970鈥檚, our day-to-day lives and communications were not recorded in bits and bytes. Now that we have so much more interaction with technology, we desperately need oversight and protections to keep those in power from trampling our freedoms.

The 6th Circuit hearing regarding the NSA鈥檚 warrantless wiretapping program is tomorrow at 3pm EST. I鈥檒l be blogging throughout the day from Cincinnati, so more to come on what鈥檚 up for discussion and how the arguments go.

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