Patriot Act, Edward Snowden, and NSA Spying

The President has come out with some proposed "reforms" to NSA spying.  He wants to keep the current plan, vacuum up all telephone call meta data on everyone but have the data stored outside of the government.  Does anyone recall Target?  Private companies are less capable of safeguarding the data than the NSA.  He also is proposing to limit data mining to two "hops" instead of three.  A "hop" being defined as the number of calls removed from a foreign caller.

A Crisis in Leadership

Chris Christie, the darling of the Republican establishment finally has hit a wall that, hopefully, will take him off the stage for the Republican presidential nomination.  That is, aides in his New Jersey government got caught deliberately tying up traffic in the city of a political rival.  Of course he has fired the obvious culprits but his explanation that he didn't know about any of it smacks of the current White House resident.  What these failures, as the ones in the Obama administration, illustrate is a crisis of leadership.  Politics apparently revels in unethical behavior that is tolerated by some political leaders providing they have no knowledge of the unethical act.  This is the case for Christie, Obama, Nixon, and Reagan, to name a few.

DROPOUTJEEP, NSA, Edward Snowden

Two posts in two days on the NSA spying issues.  This will be a short post.  This concerns the unintended consequences of NSA hacking into our phones.

First, we don't know how extensive the NSA software hack on iphones is.  That program, apparently called DROPOUTJEEP, is introduced between shipping and receipt of an iphone or perhaps even remotely.  If it is put into all iphones it is a different situation than if it is only put on a few targeted iphones.  Of course, since the NSA has demonstrated no restraint and absolute overreach, we are likely to assume the worst.

Here is the unintended consequence of a phone hack.  If this is spying software that can access your data, your location, your camera, and your microphone, that means that some no-NSA entity might uncover the hack somehow and find a way to get the same data out.  Until now, the iphone has been so unhackable that it can be used for banking over secure wifi networks.  Until someone determines the scale of this latest nonsense, no mobile device can be considered safe from non-NSA criminals.

It is time for action against these programs in congress.  If there is a DROPOUTJEEP program on everyone's iphone or even a large number, the US government should face an enormous class action lawsuit from all iphone users.  While the government can decide who sues, perhaps a large class action suit will force the government to acknowledge the scope of what they've done and help us to  clear off the software from our phones.