This Is China

Reading former FCC Commissioner Reed Hundt's take on the NSA story I'm struck by this paragraph:

No one should imagine that what NSA has done, if reports are accurate, is normal behavior or standard procedure in the interaction between a private communications network and the government. In an authoritarian country without a bill of rights and with state ownership of the communications network, such eavesdropping by people and computers is assumed to exist. But in the United States it is assumed not to occur, except under very carefully defined circumstances that, according to reports, were not present as NSA allegedly arm-twisted telephone companies into compliance. That is a topic that can't be avoided in the general's hearing, if he gets that far.

This is what the Chinese government does when they shut down Google searches or censor material written by their citizens. They have state-run control of the telecommunications services, and compliance agreements with the Internet service providers and their attendant dot-com companies. In fact, this is EXACTLY what the right was shrieking abiout lately, when it was revealed that Google and Microsoft had knuckled under to Chinese censors to elminate certain searches from coming up in the Chinese versions of their search engines. Authoritarian control should be resisted, they said. Of course, when it's our country doing the deals with the telcos to monitor tens of millions of Americans, that's suddenly OK. I've seen them try to relate this to what comes on your phone bill, which is nuts. The argument there is that the NSA is collecting all this information simply for safe keeping, that they plan to store it and never look at it again. Wrong. They're gill-netting, running the data through sophisticated databasing software looking for patterns. Of course, the patterns could be the word "terrorist," or they could be the phrase "Democratic National Committee." It's hardly paranoid to suggest that since that's exactly the kind of lawbreaking that caused FISA to be organized in the first place. It's happened before, there's no reason to think that it couldn't happen again.

Furthermore, there are laws that this activity expressly violates, like this one:

1986: electronic communications privacy act
Protects the privacy of electronic communications and transactional data such as telephone records.

The government simply is not allowed to do this. Violating laws in the name of terrorism basically turns this into a police state.