The Wall Street Journal reports that a panel convened by the president to review the National Security Agency’s programs will recommend that “the records of nearly every U.S. phone call now collected in a controversial NSA program be held instead by the phone company or a third-party organization.” That recommendation is a non-starter.
Mandatory data retention has been floated for years using the most politically appealing rationale, child predation. In 2007, we characterized the idea as costly, outsourced surveillance, and Congress has consistently denied that power to the government. In fact, child protection bills containing data retention mandates were introduced in several Congresses but only passed once provisions deputizing communications providers into government surveillance were stripped out. Randy Barnett and I made this point in our brief urging the Supreme Court to take up the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone calling.
“Congress has declined to institute mandatory data retention laws because the costs, risks, and privacy consequences for innocent citizens outweigh their law enforcement and security benefits,” we wrote. “The Verizon order reverses this Congressional policy by requiring a telecommunications provider to turn all data over to the government for retention by the National Security Agency.”
How ironic it would be if the NSA’s illegal excesses delivered it a victory on a policy initiative that it lost years ago. Is secretly violating Americans’ communications privacy really rewarded by a policy requiring the violation of Americans’ communications privacy?
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R‑WI), who claims authorship of the USA-PATRIOT Act, came to Cato two months ago to lament the NSA’s use of that law for domestic spying he did not intend the NSA to have. In the past, he has said that data retention “runs roughshod over the privacy rights of people who use the Internet for thousands of lawful purposes.” Assumedly, he believes the same as to people’s use of the phone, and he will continue working with other privacy-minded legislators to relegate data retention mandates to the dustbin of history.
