“As a result of their rubber stamp court, the intelligence community has, in essence changed, the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment from requiring probable cause, to if we want to we can.”

Dave Owen/ Dakota Student 

With the recent release of the movie, Edward Snowden has once again become a household name. With that notoriety, it is time once again to discuss the world of intelligence in regards to the average American citizen, and the constant struggle that occurs between the desire of both freedom and security.

The goal of this article will not be to determine whether or not Snowden committed crimes, since objectively speaking he did. However, the important question is should what he did be considered illegal? Whar are the implications of his leaks?

Snowden, illegally released information that the NSA had gathered including but not limited to their methods of data analysis, the exact targeting mechanisms used, specific monitored conversations and the estimated funding that went to these “black box” programs. As a result of this and alleged crimes against most NATO allies, Snowden fled to the Russian Federation, where he currently stays. At this time it is unknown whether he is able to freely move about Russia or is essentially living in a gilded prison, although it is assumed that even if he wanted to leave he would be unable to return to most of the former first world, as many nations have warrants issued for his arrest upon arrival.

Snowden’s leaks have  significant impacts on the intelligence community in the United States.

First, it established that the NSA is intentionally attempting to skirt around Constitutional law by abusing a  long-existing system of kangaroo courts, where the judges are appointed and renewed based on the opinions of the intelligence community.

Due to the original design of these courts, the intelligence communities have achieved virtually limitless warrants. Due to this system warrant seekers have had approval rate exceeding 99.9 percent across more than 35,400 cases and nearly 35 years of history.

Unfortunately, these courts are not new, existing since the late 1970’s, and information about appeals is still hidden from the public. For example, in some years the court has approved more cases than have been officially submitted, such as in 1979 when they approved 104 percent of all officially submitted applications.

As a result of their rubber stamp court, the intelligence community has, in essence, changed the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment from requiring probable cause, to if we want to we can.

Additionally, it revealed that despite collecting thousands of pieces of metadata, and despite nearly 20,000 separate warrants being issued in the past decade, less than 10 convictions have occurred since the start of the program. This means the conversion rate from being suspected by the NSA to actually being found guilty in the US court system is approximately .01 percent. This already low conversion rate is actually significantly lower, when considering the fact that many of the warrants are significantly broad in nature. For example, in 2013 they gained a warrant to access all data as they saw fit through telephone provider Verizon.

Due to Snowden’s leak and this information becoming public, the NSA took substantial flak from the media, but little to no change has actually occurred to attempt to remedy the issues at play. Currently, the FISA court continues to operate at the same pace, and perceived constitutional violations continue to be ignored.

Now, we need to have an honest conversation about the goals of these programs and whether or not the blanket authority they have is an asset in the war on terror or a liability, as I believe it is.

The NSA and CIA would have you believe that by being able to access this information, they are able to detect threats early, often and infiltrate groups before harm is done to the populace. According to them, they stop criminals from achieving the final stages of planning and executing a crime.

Furthermore, they argue that their system serves as a deterrent, making any form of communication between decentralized cells nearly impossible. Since all phone and internet traffic is monitored, terrorists must travel, often internationally to even meet. This substantially delays their ability to plan and coordinate terror attacks and allows our intelligence community to intercept and redirect these meetings.

The CIA would also argue as threats increase and the nature of these threats becomes more complicated, we must sacrifice some of our freedoms in order to combat them. They further argue that the non-guilty have nothing to fear, as their data is quickly filtered out of the system and is rarely held up to the five year cap that is allowed under law.

Given the nature of the CIA and NSA it is dubious at best to take these claims at face value. Officially speaking the program never existed and enforcement of deletion is virtually non-existent by any non- intelligence body.

This means two people that work in the same office with the same goals make sure that laws which conflict with their methodology are enforced. This leads many to believe the data is held indefinitely, indeed the Snowden leaks suggested that to get around the lower year storage requirement for American nationals, a very loose definition of international communication was applied. In practice this meant that if your email went to an American from an American, but if your Internet provider used a single foreign server in the process, the data could be considered international, making all data potentially considered international.

On the other hand, there is the argument that I ascribe to, that in addition to the NSA violating your constitutional rights via the FISA court, there methodology is self-destructive. The reason one should require probable cause from a strictly pragmatic approach, is that it forces people with limited resources to focus on the most likely offenders. Instead of a broad paintbrush approach, of collecting everything and later sorting it, we have an approach which selectively targets likely offenders and is able to quickly confirm their threat level. Furthermore, this creates a system where each agent can be assigned to a complete and comprehensive analysis of the targets portfolio, as opposed to having to view all the cursory information and then target. Imagine if you applied NSA logic to reading a textbook with two days before the exam. Instead of first viewing the index and table of contents, to establish where the information probably is, you must at random scan pages until you find something that appears relevant, you would probably fail to find the information you need, only in this case instead of failing the test and being out a thousand dollars, you would have allowed hundreds of people to die.

The NSA is, an organization with debatable intentions that abjectly fails its mission as a result of being exempt from the law. I personally believe that Snowden did this country a great service by revealing what he did, and I hope he will someday be allowed to return home as a hero rather than as a villain.

Dave Owen is the opinion editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected]