After the Snowden disclosures, Congress reined in an invasive surveillance program. Now it needs to finish the job.
that reauthorization would permit the government to “retain this potentially valuable tool should it prove useful in the future.
In other words, the government asserts that Congress should let the intelligence agencies maintain the invasive, ineffective program as another “tool in the toolbox” because you never know when you may want it. The key problem with the toolbox metaphor is that it leaves the impression that the Section 215 CDR program is something an intelligence analyst could simply grab and use in a hurry when it’s needed, like a hammer or a screwdriver. But the metaphor doesn’t hold. The Section 215 CDR program is a highly complex system that involves collecting electronic data—including the records of numerous Americans—from various communications service providers, analyzing this data, and storing it securely.
Even if we did accept the administration’s “toolbox” metaphor, its reasoning is deeply flawed. If you discovered that a tool was more dangerous than helpful—say an electric saw that was hard to use without cutting off a finger—you would get rid of it and rely on other, safer alternatives. You wouldn’t store it in your toolbox for some hypothetical future use.
Finally, as a matter of principle, intelligence agencies should not be given every tool they may want, but only those that they need, and only those that can be implemented in a manner that protects individual rights. Intelligence work is difficult, and foreign intelligence information can come from unexpected sources. But this does not mean that intelligence agencies should be given broad authorities to monitor everyone all the time.
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