"We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government." ― William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, dissenting in Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 341 (1966)
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The government has become an expert in finding ways to sidestep what it considers "inconvenient laws" aimed at ensuring accountability and thereby bringing about government transparency and protecting citizen privacy.
Indeed,
it has mastered the art of stealth maneuvers and end-runs around the Constitution.
It knows all too well how to hide its nefarious, covert, clandestine activities behind the classified language of national security and terrorism. And when that doesn't suffice, it obfuscates, complicates, stymies or just plain bamboozles the public into remaining in the dark.
Case in point: the National Security Agency (NSA) has been
diverting "internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans."
It's extraordinary rendition all over again, only this time it's surveillance instead of torture being outsourced.
In much the same way that the
government moved its torture programs overseas in order to bypass legal prohibitions against doing so on American soil, it is
doing the same thing for its surveillance programs.
By shifting its data storage, collection and surveillance activities outside of the country—
a tactic referred to as "traffic shaping" —the
government is able to bypass constitutional protections against unwarranted searches of Americans' emails, documents, social networking data, and other cloud-stored data.
The government, however, doesn't even need to move its programs overseas. It just has to
push the data over the border in order to "[circumvent] constitutional and statutory safeguards seeking to protect the privacy of Americans."
Credit for this particular brainchild goes to the Obama administration, which issued
Executive Order 12333 authorizing the collection of Americans' data from surveillance conducted on foreign soil.
Comment: Wow, that has to be so embarrassing for the Senate to not know how the Constitution works!