Sen Wyden: Weak oversight of NSA may lead to massive location tracking

In a speech at the Center for American Progress, Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) denounced the combination of an "always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state" and a covert corpus of law that hardly restraints it. "That's not the way we do it in America!" he said, his voice rising. "We don't keep laws secret!"

"You simply cannot have an informed debate," he continued. "And when the American people are in the dark, they cannot make fully informed decisions about who should represent them." Most tellingly, Wyden repeatedly invoked the possibility of the NSA doing location-tracking. In its first report on the leaks, The Guardian said that the location data is part of what the NSA gets in its dragnet collection of telephone data; but the secret Verizon court order it published didn't specifically mention location data. "Most of us here have a computer in our pocket that can potentially be used to track and monitor us 24/7," Sen Wyden remarked early on, before vaguely warning of the prospect of "a surveillance state that cannot be reversed." Later he added: "Without additional protections in the law, every single one of us... may be and can be tracked and monitored anywhere we are at any time." And again: "Today, government officials openly tell the press that they have the authority to effectively turn America's cell phones and smartphones into location-enabled homing beacons." Sen Wyden blamed this on Congress's lenient post-9/11 lawmaking (in which he has lately been a vocal dissenting minority) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's subsequent sweeping expansion of the NSA's reach.