The Best Evidence Yet That Government Surveillance Oversight Is Nowhere Near Adequate

By Steve Vladeck

As every week brings with it another new disclosure about the scope of the surveillance activities of the U.S. government, defenders of the practice continue to anchor such arguments in what one former government official described as “the most oversight-laden foreign intelligence activity in the history of the planet.” The oversight these defenders trumpet includes the intelligence agencies’ own internal checks; the one-sided, nonadversarial, and largely procedural review of such programs before the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; and the behind-closed-doors demands of the congressional intelligence committees. And, as those who support the government’s surveillance activities are keen to point out, the intelligence agencies must check each and every one of these boxes in order to, among other things, collect all of our telephony metadata; spy on foreign governments; and tap into the backbone of electronic communications service providers—like Google, Facebook, etc.  Not only are these checks and balances portrayed as rigorous, but the current proposals for additional checks and balances involving outside—or at least disinterested—actors are dismissed as simply unnecessary.