I think the phone records program is good. These records are not secret by any means (the phone company owns them, not you) and its a minimally intrusive way using amounts to pattern matching to find some people who might want to hurt me and my countrymen not for who we as individuals are, but simply because we're Americans based on their Call Detail Records history.
Having spent the majority of my career working in the Telecom industry, these records are accessed with surprising ease - anyone with any sort of access to the billing system usually has full access to them (Both at a Major ITSP and one of the major wireless carriers in North America) I had actually presumed the government did too - perhaps not in real time, but anytime they wanted on demand.
I don't consider it a private thing whom I talked to - I consider the contents of those calls protected, but not the fact I made them. For what its worth, because of the structure of our telephone network, it virtually impossibly to monitor the contents of every call - You'd have to have a recording device or special service trunks to every end point everywhere in the nation. Billing records on the other hand, are generally forwarded to a central collection point for processing into your telephone bill (as well as storage and analysis for traffic planning purposes).
For what its worth - I don't think the government has a right to access mobile telephone geolocation data without a warrant - that to me is so clearly protected as it - ought to be - to be a breach of privacy if collected without a warrant.
These are simply my opinions, others clearly feel differently - IMO there really is no wrong answer here, it's all about what feels right and just to you, and where your line of privacy is.
But not all of what the NSA is doing is bad.
I think the phone records program is good. These records are not secret by any means (the phone company owns them, not you) and its a minimally intrusive way using amounts to pattern matching to find some people who might want to hurt me and my countrymen not for who we as individuals are, but simply because we're Americans based on their Call Detail Records history.
Having spent the majority of my career working in the Telecom industry, these records are accessed with surprising ease - anyone with any sort of access to the billing system usually has full access to them (Both at a Major ITSP and one of the major wireless carriers in North America) I had actually presumed the government did too - perhaps not in real time, but anytime they wanted on demand.
I don't consider it a private thing whom I talked to - I consider the contents of those calls protected, but not the fact I made them. For what its worth, because of the structure of our telephone network, it virtually impossibly to monitor the contents of every call - You'd have to have a recording device or special service trunks to every end point everywhere in the nation. Billing records on the other hand, are generally forwarded to a central collection point for processing into your telephone bill (as well as storage and analysis for traffic planning purposes).
For what its worth - I don't think the government has a right to access mobile telephone geolocation data without a warrant - that to me is so clearly protected as it - ought to be - to be a breach of privacy if collected without a warrant.
These are simply my opinions, others clearly feel differently - IMO there really is no wrong answer here, it's all about what feels right and just to you, and where your line of privacy is.