Obama on Surveillance: "We Can and Must Be More Transparent"

Today President Obama held a press conference to address the situation surrounding the NSA's surveillance activities. (Here is the full transcript.) He announced four actions the administration is undertaking to restore the public's confidence in the intelligence community. Obama plans to work with Congress to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to give greater weight to civil liberties, and to revisit section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which is the section that allowed bulk collection of phone records. (Of course, "will work with Congress" is a vague term, and Congress isn't known for getting things done lately. Thus, it remains to be seen if anything substantive happens.) Obama is ordering the Dept. of Justice to make public their legal rationale for data collection, and there will be a new NSA official dedicated to transparency efforts. There will also be a new website for citizens to learn about transparency in intelligence agencies. Lastly, a group of outside experts will be convened to review the government's surveillance capabilities. Their job will include figuring out how to maintain the public's trust and prevent abuse, and to consider how the intelligence community's actions will affect foreign policy. In addition to these initiatives, President Obama made his position very clear about several different aspects of this controversy. While acknowledging that "we have significant capabilities," he said, "America is not interested in spying on ordinary people." He added that the people who have raised concerns about privacy and government overreach in a lawful manner are "patriots." This is in stark contrast to his view of leakers like Edward Snowden: "I don't think Mr. Snowden was a patriot." (For his part, Snowden says the recent shut down of encrypted email services is 'inspiring.') When asked about how his opinion of the surveillance programs have changed, he said his perception of them has not evolved since the story broke worldwide. "What you're not seeing is people actually abusing these programs." Obama also endorsed finding technological solutions that will protect privacy regardless of what government agencies want to do.

Comments

Re:The O in Obama stands for Zero Credibility

[sconeu]

Dear President Obama,

If you don't know of any abuse of these programs, may we suggest you ask the DEA?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/08/05/more-surveillance-abuse-exposed-special-dea-unit-is-spying-on-americans-and-covering-it-up/

Thank you,

The American Citizenry

Re:I'm not reassured.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

To my knowledge, there haven't really been allegations of people digging into these records for specific unethical and abusive purposes.

Actually, there has.

Someone at the NSA was snooping through Bill Clinton's email.

Re:The O in Obama stands for Zero Credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

"What you're not seeing is people actually abusing these programs." - Obama.

You're not seeing the abuse, therefore it's not happening.

Actually, we are seeing the abuse.

TL;DR: The DEA is obtaining information from the NSA, then pretending that their investigation didn't use it (because it would be inadmissible in court). They then practice "parallel construction" and reconstruct a fake trail of evidence to cover their tracks. They never share this with the defense counsel. This undermines pretrial discovery rules and the entire justice system.

Re:Better idea, shut it down - it's illegal....

[quarterbuck]

It seems the government has released the legal justification http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/10/us/politics/10obama-surveillance-documents.html?hp&_r=0
It seems to go like this
1) The Feds cannot legally read letters
2) But metadata collection is legal (by court rulings). i.e. addresses written on the letters are fair game. Stretching this, collecting metadata on calls (from:, to:, length of call) is legal. Same goes for emails.
3) But it is not easy to just collect metadata. So they collect everything and then delete all the "data" and retain metadata on every call.
4) Some section of patriot act authorized collection of even more data using secret courts when the issue is foreign intelligence or terrorism related. So as long as calls are cross border or of a suspected terrorist, the calls can be recorded.The broad scope of the warrant ensures this. Since there is a secret warrant backing this, this is not unconstitutional.
5) The same secret warrant covers compelling private businesses to monitor users etc.
6) Once intelligence is collected, FBI etc. can be notified.

Not saying all this is right, but this is my reading of the document.