University of Wisconsin Professor Alan Rubel says it’s important to learn the right lessons from the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program.
Rubel will speak at Western Michigan University on Wednesday. His address is called What’s Wrong with the NSA’s Bulk Metadata Collection Program. He says a broad political consensus has formed that NSA’s program needed to be reined in. Congress passed the USA Freedom Act earlier this year to curtail some of that data collection. President Obama signed it into law.
Details of the bulk data collection program became known when Edward Snowden revealed it in 2013. Rubel says one of the main problems with the program is that the secrecy that surrounded it. He says people might not like phone calls and e-mails being monitored, but Rubel says the public should be able to make decisions knowing about the government surveillance. He says it’s also not clear that large data collection done in secret is effective at limiting terrorist attacks.
Rubel says people’s lives have been turned upside down because their communication was being monitored. He says that includes innocent people who were not involved in criminal activity. Rubel says some groups have also been monitored for no obvious reason other than their political activism.
The increased surveillance followed the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Rubel says the lack of a terrorist attack since then and the revelations by contractor Edward Snowden about bulk data collection made it politically possible to reform the NSA’s data collection practices.
