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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.
Less than 48 hours ago with Jay Leno he said, and repeated: "We don't have a domestic spying program."
Today he admits that some spying is taking place, but they are "not interested in spying on ordinary people", and the domestic spying program has safeguards to help keep it from being abused.
That is quite a backstep.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
False. Bush's Patriot act expired in 2011. Obama signed the extension. Anything that happens under the Patriot act now is Obama's fault, not Bush's. If it is company policy to beat employees who do wrong, and a new boss takes over and keeps beating people who do wrong, do you blame the old boss, or the new boss when the new boss beats you?
they wanted him to install backdoors so that lavabit wouldn't work like it claims(and attacks to be delivered upon access).
for other kind of action they could just have bust in and take the servers. maybe they were going to take over it by spooks so he had to officially close it down before that.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.