Jello Jay Rockefeller: Associational Database Is “Core Governmental Function”

I’m watching the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats, and will have more to say about the Snowden fear-mongering later.

But I wanted to point to Jello Jay Rockefeller’s remarkable campaign in favor of the status quo for the dragnet.

He argued against the telecoms taking the data, because their interest is not in protecting privacy (yet they’re playing with our data all the time).

He then said the phone dragnet — a database of all the phone-based relationships in the US in the last 5 years — was a “core governmental function.”

There you have it. Having an associational database of the entire US is a core governmental function, the oversight people think.