My humble suggestion regarding the phone and internet database issue. The data involved in the present controversy is currently collected and owned by the ISPs and telecommunication companies. Under current practice they are giving it to the government to be stored and used as an investigative database. Under this system, they then control the data and we must trust them to use it legitimately. In the current environment of IRS abuse and press harassment, I’m not willing to trust the government to keep this data safe from abuse. On the other hand, from my own investigative experience, the ability to query such a database can be a very powerful tool for legitimate investigations. I would like to suggest a way to limit the abuse potential while still allowing controlled access to the data. Under current law and regulatory authority, the government can require the companies to maintain the data they collect in an archive for some amount of time to be determined by Congress in new legislation. When the government has a need to query that data, they would apply to the appropriate court with a description of what they want to do and get subpoenas for the companies to produce the data generated by those queries. The government would then be allowed to retain and store those query results for their investigations. As the government developed new leads, they could repeat the process as often as needed. That new legislation would also prohibit the government from coercing the companies to turn over their data without court authorization. Under this suggestion, these enormous databases would remain with the owners, not the government. The government would not be in the business of collecting and storing all the raw data. This would limit the ability of “rogue” agents or people pursuing their own agendas to misuse that data. What I am suggesting is basically how state and local law enforcement get to use this information. Again, I want intelligence agencies to be able to use the data in question to help protect us. But we have seen that it is not good policy to have the end users of this information also be the gatekeepers.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:09:36 +0000
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