-By Warner Todd Huston
In a story that reads like a gushing profile article on an exciting new business venture, The New York Times reported on the vast growth and technological advancement of the National Security Agency’s data mining capabilities.
The June 8 piece titled, “How the U.S. Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly,” is filled with seemingly positive comments on the NSA’s new advancements, longer reach, and secret operations. There’s barely a hint of the sort of condemnation the paper was filled with during the Bush years when outcries against “domestic spying” were all the rage.
The Times says NSA’s capabilities are built on a “revolution in software technology,” and is “undergoing rapid expansion in order to exploit the mountains of new data being created each day.”
As the paper details all of the NSA’s exciting new technology and expanded field of operations–not to mention its gigantic new facility in Utah–the paper includes but one real voice of concern in the piece. It comes in at the very end of the article where Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, points out that there doesn’t seem to be a way that the government can collect all this data without violating the Fourth Amendment.
It is also interesting that the Times repeatedly mentions George W. Bush as the father of these expanded programs but does not once point out that Obama has been in office for fours year, has not made any move to stop these programs, and has instead expanded them further.
In fact, the name “Obama” only appears once in the entire story. In the penultimate paragraph the Times points out that Obama defended the NSA’s greatly expanded capabilities.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.