The NSA: An Inside View

One of the most concerning things about the selection process for who gets into the NSA, is that it all but guarantees a lack of diversity of thought within the NSA. There are probably very few people with opposing viewpoints so most projects that would be considered dubious by the diverse population in the US can go completely unchecked within the agency.

For example, the author mentions the following:

    They examine your 127-page Standard Form 86, in which you 
    include lists of your illegal activities, foreigners you 
    have worked with or befriended, and where you have lived 
    and traveled in your life and with whom.

The fact that someone is capable of truthfully filling out such a form is a huge flag that the person has had remarkably little exposure to the rest of the world. They are probably poorly traveled and grew up and lived in places with few if any immigrants. I don't know how someone who grew up in NYC, San Francisco, Washington DC or Los Angeles could possibly ever fill out such a form truthfully or completely. Anyone from such cities would have come in contact with and befriended so many people from other countries over the course of 18-22 years of living in such a diverse metropolis that any attempt to fill out such a form would be incomplete and could contribute to being rejected.

I don't need to. The BND, MAD, BfV and LfVs are not remotely doing anything like the NSA - not in scale and not in breadth.

The problem here is that you trust the organization to police itself, whereas it has little incentive to actually do so effectively.

The cases of caught individuals seem to have gone under-punished, as they sound worthy of prison time.

Also, even if the NSA polices against personal abuses, why would it police against systematic abuse for government's purposes against the constitution?

Self-policing does not work well, especially without elaborate mechanisms to enable it to work, and especially with a combination of secrecy and lack of oversight.

@"What in the Fourth Amendment speaks to electronic communications? The Fourth Amendment speaks to a person, their home, and their effects."

The Fourth Amendment also protects people's papers from warrantless search and the Crown's abuse of the privacy of papers when executing its "general warrants" were a huge driver in the adoption of that Amendment. Private electronic communications are "papers" in that context, a "gift" of a paper from one to another.

But more importantly, the question you ask is phrased too narrowly in context. The First Amendment protects the right to communicate privately, free from government scrutiny. And the Fifth Amendment forbids the government from taking private property without due process and just compensation.

Roll all three of those amendments together and you should begin to comprehend that Congress, in establishing criminal penalties for interception of the U.S. mail --- a topic you curiously omitted --- stood on very firm constitutional ground when it did so.

Your notion that U.S. mail is protected only by federal statute simply blinks past the fact that our federal government is a government of only limited powers, allowed only to do what is permitted by the Constitution, with all other powers and rights reserved to the States and the People; i.e., a "mail" law can not lawfully exist without Constitutional authorization for Congress to enact such a law.

Also missing from your U.S. mail analogy is any analysis of a basis for believing that eMail should have any less protection than the U.S. mail. It is a criminal act for a government official on their own decision to open a letter to read the contents except in narrow common sense situations, such as a letter that is missing or has an invalid address. Why should eMail have any less protection?

Paul E. Merrell, J.D.

> unless you grant me the authority to access datastore Z

NSA analysts accessing datastore Z is not the problem, and never was.

Datastore Z is the problem. According to the leaked documents those datastores contain data of U.S. citizens which the NSA couldn't have legally intercepted and stored without a court order.

E.g. the NSA cannot legally acquire copies of John Smith's email header fields and store them into datastore Z without a warrant defined by the 4th amendment.