Ratner: NSA Surveillance Needs to Be Torn Apart, Branch by Branch [View all]

[mother earth]

Michael Ratner is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and Chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He is currently a legal adviser to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. He and CCR brought the first case challenging the Guantanamo detentions and continue in their efforts to close Guantanamo. He taught at Yale Law School, and Columbia Law School, and was President of the National Lawyers Guild. His current books include "Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in the Twenty-First Century America," and “ Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away With Murder.” NOTE: Mr. Ratner speaks on his own behalf and not for any organization with which he is affiliated.

And I want to say, as I enter it--and I'll close that discussion with this as well--is that we have to be very careful here about different organizations, different groups that suggest reform of the NSA, because in the end what we may see, unfortunately, is very superficial reform, leaving the heart of this massive spy structure in place. And I don't want to hear people say, oh, this is a great report, you know, etc., etc., because it's not that. We really have to get rid of the NSA root and branch. We have to get to its core. We have to stop what it's doing.

But let's go to the report for a second. The report was released earlier than it was, for--one reason that was given in the papers was that the internet companies were complaining that having all this massive spying and backdoors in internet companies, ways of getting into Google and all of the other companies, that was causing damage to the American economy, American businesses. People didn't trust us. And therefore we have to show that we're going to reform that system. That's why they supposedly reached it early.

Another reason, in my view, they may have reached it early is there's actually a piece of legislation pending in Congress called the U.S.A. Freedom Act. Now, that act is not perfect, but it's better than the report that just came out. It goes farther. So it's conceivable that this report came out as a way of undercutting what might be more serious legislation at really limiting the NSA.

Let's go to the report for a second. Who made up the committee? A former CIA deputy director, a man named Cass Sunstein, whose partner, wife, Samantha Power, works for President Obama, the UN representative. Cass Sunstein did as well. The other people on the committee, you know, quite moderate to being government officials. So you don't expect much from it. People seem to be happy that it did better than they thought, or at least some people do. I, for one, am not.

And the key thing that people have focused on--and we've heard gushing reports from people: oh, no more mass metadata surveillance, at least not by the NSA. What the report recommends is that metadata on all our phone calls be kept by the phone companies. So Verizon keeps it, T-Mobile keeps it, etc. They keep it. And then, when the NSA needs it, they ask for it.

Well, I don't think that's anything. That's ridiculous. That's still mass surveillance of all of our phone calls. That's not a protection. It still risks civil liberties violations. It risks our privacy. No trust to it.

There has to be an absolute end to mass surveillance, whether it's by private companies or by the government. I don't consider one to be significantly more honest or better--in fact, perhaps less. Who knows. But certainly neither one should be able to engage in mass surveillance. There should be no such thing as mass surveillance. Surveillance should only be done under court order with a warrant.

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