The Navy is watching us. (image: Shutterstock)

By Jason Koebler, VICE

20 September 14

t's not just the NSA: A Federal Appeals Court has just noted a disturbing and "extraordinary" trend of the Navy conducting mass surveillance on American civilians, and then using what they find to help local law enforcement prosecute criminals.

In this specific case, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service agent in George scanned the computers of every civilian in Washington state who happened to be using the decentralized Gnutella peer-to-peer network, looking for child pornography. The agent, Steve Logan, found child porn on a computer owned by a man named Michael Dreyer.

Logan then passed his evidence on to local law enforcement, who arrested and eventually convicted Dreyer, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled that this was a massive overstep of military authority, a disturbing trend, and a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a law that prohibits the military from conducting investigations on civilians.

The government argued that it conducted the surveillance on the off chance that it caught a military member violating the law and suggested that it has this authority in any state with a military base.

This case, Judge Marsha Berzon argued, demonstrates that that's clearly not the case.

"The government's position that the military may monitor and search all computers in a state even though it has no reason to believe that the computer's owner has a military affiliation would render the PCA's restrictions entirely meaningless," she wrote. "The record here demonstrates that Agent Logan and other NCIS agents routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate the restrictions on military enforcement of civilian law."

The violation was so egregious that Berzon and her fellow judges argued that "the extraordinary nature of the surveillance demonstrates a need to deter future violations."

"It has become routine practice for the Navy to conduct surveillance of all the civilian computers in an entire state to see whether any child pornography can be found on them, and then to turn over the information to civilian law enforcement when no military connection exists," she added.

We can talk about NSA reform all we want, but the fact remains that it's not just the NSA that can and does conduct mass surveillance, whether it's legal to do so or not.