The White House has suggested four possible options to fix the NSA spying issue according to an article in the Wall Street Journal on February 26. The options have been presented to the U.S. Intelligence Agencies and the Attorney General with a March 28 deadline. Three of the options deal involve restructuring the collection process and the fourth is a drastic move. The options involve:
Option 1: Require phone companies to retain the collected data.
Option 2: Require a government agency other than the NSA to retain the collected data.
Option 3: Require an organization other than phone companies or a government agency to retain the collected data.
Option 4: Scrap the entire NSA collection process and rely on other intelligence gathered to determine threat vectors.
I don't like any of the options myself. Option 1 is foolish. Why would valuable and potentially sensitive data be held by an entity outside the government. Does anyone think they would willingly deploy adequate security measures to protect this data? Does anyone think they have the funds to retain the volume of data? The next issue would involve the public accusing the phone companies of meddling with personal information.
Option 2 is better than option 1 but not very practical. The article suggests that the FBI or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court retain the data. In theory this sounds good. The problem is the FBI would need to beef up staff, equipment and storage capacity. Sounds good on paper until you consider the issues I mentioned. Then there is the final issue... getting the data from the collection points to the FBI. I can't imagine how much bandwidth would be needed to transfer the data to a new collection site. It sounds like a bad idea. Next, considering the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Hmmm -- this where the judges sit. I would never suggest corruption against any federal judge - but I can see how this could occur when the data and the man with the stick are in the same area. The data and the ruler need to be separated to ensure that no corruption can take place.
Option 3. Nice try on this but this imagine the costs of implementing this solution. Someone (that means you and me) would have to pay for this middleman to coordinate data between the two entities. The number of processes would increase to accomplish the same task. This would involve more people as well. Adding more individuals working on the process. The end result would not be an increase of security. In fact, expecting the level of privacy to increase is like thinking that reducing the number of soldiers in the Army will improve our nations security.
Option 4. I don't know how viable an option this truly is. I have no idea how we are gathering intelligence. In theory, we are already doing this by utilizing the NSA intelligence with other information gathered by other sources to identify targets. It seems like we would be cutting intelligence sources from valuable data.
We must protect this country. I don't like the changes being suggested and implemented. Reducing the efficiency of the NSA and the Army are not wise. I would rather see citizens be asked to man up instead of leaning back and reducing our protection strategy.
This week marks my last week of my current class. I enjoyed another valuable semester of learning from my professor and fellow students.
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