Visibly Annoyed Obama Unveils Non-Reforms on NSA Surveillance
Visibly Annoyed Obama Unveils Non-Reforms on NSA Surveillance
Insists He's 'Comfortable' With the Current Program
by Jason Ditz, August 09, 2013
From the moment he emerged at the White House press conference today, President Obama had a visible chip on his shoulder, apparently annoyed that facing growing public outrage over the NSA surveillance schemes he had to make public promises of reforms.
Or at least what passes for reforms in his mind. Obama insisted that he is entirely “comfortable” with the surveillance system as currently constituted and expressed anger that “rather than a lawful process” the public debate was a result of leaks.
The president promised four “reforms,” three of which amounted to talking with other officials about how to sell the American public on the idea that everything is going as well as he thinks it is, and the fourth of which offering a minor tweak to FISA courts.
That tweak was the idea, proposed before, to have a “civil liberties advocate” present at FISA courts, since apparently judges in secret courts don’t take individual freedom very seriously. Obama expressed openness to the idea, but would only allow advocates “in appropriate cases.”
Beyond that, the sum total of the promises amounted to hiring a “full-time privacy officer” to work at the NSA, a single employee who will no doubt get lost in that ever-growing leviathan, and a pledge that the intelligence community will eventually make a web site explaining to people how great surveillance is.
Oddly, Obama conceded of the surveillance that “I would be worried too if I wasn’t inside the government,” but then went on to insist that the public would’ve been fine with the program but his trust was “undermined” by leaks, which of course are the only reason the American public knew about the surveillance in the first place.
Most of the press conference was of little substance, with Obama angrily rejecting questions about drone strikes in Yemen and mocking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s slouch, saying he’s “lookin’ like the bored kid in the classroom.”
He only briefly touched on Edward Snowden personally, mostly just attacking the leaks as “unlawful” and a “threat to national security.” In that brief mention, Obama rejected the notion that Snowden was a patriot, and demanded that if he truly believed what he did was right he return to America immediate to accept punishment for it.
Obama White Paper Claims Broad Surveillance Powers
'Relevance' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means
by Jason Ditz, August 10, 2013
The word “relevance” has now been officially tortured into a new word that meansessentially nothing at all, as the Obama Administration’s “white paper” on surveillance stakes out a position claiming ridiculous levels of power based on the post-”enhanced interrogation” version of the word.
For years, the NSA’s telephone surveillance scheme never needed a public defense, because the public was never supposed to know about it in the first place. The Justice Department, asked to come up with one (which was obviously written long after the fact because it insists within the whitepaper that much of the program is too classified to defend at all), noticed that they have the power to collect things relevant to terror investigations, and decided that would work great if we’re not too picky on the word relevance.
And they’re not too picky, noting that most phone calls by most Americans have literally nothing to do with terrorism, but arguing that if you wad up all the data on all phone calls into a big database some of the calls might conceivably be relevant, and the others would catch relevance like some communicable disease.
It’s a lazy, and not particularly persuasive defense. Essentially it’s like putting a few frames of a bin Laden video into the middle of a South Park marathon and arguing that every single episode shown was “relevant” because bin Laden showed up that one time.
If the analogy sounds ridiculous, it’s because the argument is, because the Justice Department literally focuses their public case on the idea that courts will grant “relevance” to anything adjacent to something really relevant, even if that adjacency was done by the NSA after the fact just for the hell of it. The burden of proof is impossibly weak, but given FISA courts’ role as a rubber-stamp behind a locked door, it’s also entirely plausible that they’re correct about how little it takes to satisfy judges.
posted by Satish Sharma at
14:19
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