As I suspected, the president’s proposed reforms don’t go as far as I would like. But, they actually go further than I thought they would. So, I guess I am pleasantly surprised but still unsatisfied. I was never overly concerned about the retention of metadata, but I did see the compromise of encryption systems as a serious problem. I don’t see that addressed in the president’s remarks. I’d like to see the FBI’s national security letters further restricted or completely overhauled. There are probably several other things I’d like to see changed that I am not thinking of right now. What do you think?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
While your comments in the previous post were 100% on target, I think Obama is in a stronger position, in that it is obvious to everyone outside of the American fascist intelligence clique that the NSA is damaging our international relations and something had to be done.
I don’t think the NSA’s activities (our foreign spying directives) damaging international relations has as much to do with the President’s “reforms” as you might think.
Our foreign spying directives happen to be legitimate and most foreign countries, allies and otherwise, are doing much the same thing albeit perhaps less effectively. The key difference being that our efforts were outed publicly and in embarrassing fashion. Much of the criticism is theater for domestic political purposes.
Obama made a big deal of not spying on foreign leaders when the truly objectionable part of our spying is that of mass collection of data belong to US citizens.
I’m generally a lot less concerned about the details of the NSA’s surveillance policies than I am about the lack of transparency around the way the policies have been set and what they are, and I don’t think the reforms do nearly as much around that as I would like, but they’re better than nothing.
What do I think? I think these assholes have been destroying this country bit by bit over the course of my entire lifetime.
Yes.
The important thing about this speech is that the President positioned himself squarely in the corner of the intelligence agencies rhetorically. We will know after 2017 what actually unfolds.
As for the particulars.
If the President wanted to make sure that this issue did not go away, this is exactly the proposals and speech to give. And the intelligence community cannot fault him for not coming to their defense, organizationally and rhetorically.
This is getting very interesting. Watch what the President does, not what he says.
And oh, yes, it is nowhere near acceptable. And we can very well unilaterally disarm our intelligence services if there is no baby in the dirty bathwater. And their performance has been abysmal–for 67 years. They’ve served more as a political base for certain types of policies than as an effective intelligence and special operations service.
#3 is the one that leapt out to me immediately, for pretty much the same reasons. It’s one thing if the telcoms are retaining their own records, but this seems to open the door to an entirely separate entity like Booz Allen, which to me would be at least several times worse than an actual government database.
Obama asked us to give up more of our privacy in exchange for nothing. Following up on Mr. Charles Pierce, I see no attempt at all at “balancing” constitutional freedoms (and I don’t mean to sound like a teatard when I say that) against NSA surveillance.
There is literally no point in parsing what Mr. Obama said. The abuses are already illegal, but they happen anyway. It doesn’t matter what the law says, because the law is not, will not be, cannot be enforced. Therefore, it also doesn’t matter what the stated policy is.
At Digby’s place:
Emphasis added. Unstated is that the “national security state” means helicopter drops of billions and billions of dollars on highly profitable contractors that produce nothing of substantive value.
Nothing short of shutting the whole damn thing down will allow an assessment of what, if any, pieces are of enough value to buy in the future. And that assessment must use the same high-tolerance for “mistakes” that the current system benefits from. Therefore, another 9/11 that cost nothing to attempt to prevent, would be evidence that spending nothing still beats spending hundreds of billions not to prevent.
This whole NSA “scandal” is a bunch of nothing anyway. When there’s nothing there, there’s little the President could do.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has compiled an FAQ about NSA spying. It also has a archive of the NSA documents released by the news media so far.
And here is an archive of the documents released.
For most IT security people the biggest scandal is that the NSA through actions taken in the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided a specification for encryption that weakened encryption instead of strengthening it. And this allowed NSA (and any other actor who discovered this vulnerability) to gain access to systems that were supposed to be strongly encrypted. Another scandal for IT security people is the use of contractors to create parts of offensive cyberweapons, who then can resell those parts off the shelf to other customers. There is particular concern that parts used in the Stuxnet virus that destroyed Iran’s uranium centrifuges have provided a template for other actors to write viruses that affect the computerized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that control power substations, industrial processes, and mechanical equipment. That instead of making US economic assets less vulnerable, NSA projects have had the effect of making them more vulnerable.
The legal scandal is the violation of the Fourth amendment which is supposed to prevent searches and seizures without warrants. What the NSA and the FISA Court are doing are issuing general warrants for seizure of telephone call information that scoop up the information of billions of innocent people, establish the patterns of social association among a certain proportion of those people not based on warrantable evidence and then use those lists to search large amounts of content that has been taken through duplicating the data streams of major internet services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo, and so on. The information that is being scooped up is equivalent to the general assistance warrants that the British used prior to the Revolution and that was the reason the Fourth Amendment exists in the first place.
There is a lot that the President could do should he choose to do it, a lot that he need not announce, and there is much more that Congress could do if it chose to do it.
It is anything but a bunch of nothing. It is similar but much bigger because of improvements in technology to what the Church Committee unearthed in the 1970s and the FISA Court was supposed to fix.
And it potentially provides the executive branch with a lot of unchecked power, which is structurally tempting to some President who wants absolute power. So just imagine Ted Cruz or Chris Christie with these powers.
What the NSA and the FISA Court are doing are issuing general warrants for seizure of telephone call information that scoop up the information of billions of innocent people,When there’s nothing there, there’s little the President could do. It’s one thing if the telcoms are retaining their own records, but this seems to open the door to an entirely separate entity like Booz Allen.Canada John Tavares Jersey