That is a screengrab from a letter sent from the United States Department of Justice to the Judge hearing the NSA case. It illustrates the title to this diary with the following sentence: "In 2012, for example, fewer than 300 unique identifiers were authorized for query under the RAS standard." To put that number into some perspective, in 2010, there were over
3,194 wiretap requests from the federal government and twenty-five state governments. Eighty-four percent (84%) of those wiretaps involved alleged drug transactions, homicide was cited in five percent (5%) and four percent (4%) involved alleged racketeering. For additional perspective, the
FCC reported in 2009 that there were 672,000,000 (672m) unique telephone numbers in the United States.
The letter, by the way, can be viewed in full at this link provided by the ACLU. If you are having trouble with the pdf format, a recent Yahoo/Christian Science Monitor article provides some quotes and background. I will provide screengrabs of other portions of the USDOJ letter below, but they don't contain the entirety of the document.
The above screengrab of the USDOJ letter provides a description of the process and a few justifications for the program, including the "intelligence gap" that existed at the time of 9/11 and the language about the program's contribution to the "disruption of multiple potential terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad." I believe the "intelligence gap" is related to the ease and impunity with which foreign operatives would've been able to enter the country at that time, buy a phone at WalMart and "phone home" during the planning or operational stages of a terrorist act. (This is just a guess on my part.)
This screengrab describes some of the safeguards in general terms. On the internet, you can find the details of the safeguards afforded for
similar programs, and they are very specific and very written down. Positions like that of the "Civil Liberties Protection Officer" are mentioned, the right of communications carriers to appeal decisions is mentioned, as are keystroke audits, civil liberties training, and the requirement that privacy laws be followed. This paragraph also shows how my "Green Hat, Green Shirt" analogy comes into play.
If the Government for some reason found it beneficial to know where everyone wearing a green hat and green shirt were located at any particular time, would that be a search of any particular person? Mind you, the Government would not be able to know the name of the person, his or her address or any other distinguishing information, just that some person with a green shirt and green hat was at somple place at some time for a specific period.
The screengrab above establishes the Government's position that the program was "approved and is ... overseen by all three branches of the Government." For those believing in checks and balances, that should be a comfort. For those with slippery slope arguments, the Obama Administration has ensured that all three branches of the government have a say in the program, which is an Executive precedent.
The last screengrab I've provided deals with a personal hobby and sometime occupation of mine: Constitutional Law. The USDOJ has not stated the Supreme Court test for privacy or search and seizure cases, but has relied on the
Smith v. Maryland case and the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard. What the US Attorney is saying is that the Supreme Court has already held that metadata from the telephone is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The reasoning behind that, and underpinning the
Smith v. Maryland case, is that the person making the call has voluntarily given that information to the commercial carrier and cannot reasonably expect it to be private under the Fourth Amendment. And once that information is "public" for Fourth Amendment purposes, it will not magically convert to protected privacy status at a later date.
Note that this is not the Government's brief on the subject, which will be much longer and even drier. It was presumably provided to the Judge hearing the case for informational and scheduling purposes.