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Obama Praises NSA But Promises To Rein It In
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Josh Gerstein writes on Politico that President Barack Obama told Chris Matthews in an interview recorded for MSNBC's 'Hardball' that he'll be reining in some of the snooping conducted by the NSA, but he did not detail what new limits he plans to impose on the embattled spy organization. 'I'll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA. And...to initiate some reforms that can give people more confidence,' said the President who insisted that the NSA's work shows respect for the rights of Americans, while conceding that its activities are often more intrusive when it comes to foreigners communicating overseas. 'The NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls. Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws.' During the program, Matthews raised the surveillance issue by noting a Washington Post report on NSA gathering of location data on billion of cell phones overseas. 'Young people, rightly, are sensitive to the needs to preserve their privacy and to retain internet freedom. And by the way, so am I,' responded the President. 'That's part of not just our First Amendment rights and expectations in this country, but it's particularly something that young people care about, because they spend so much time texting and-- you know, Instagramming.' With some at the NSA feeling hung out to dry by the president, Obama also went out of his way to praise the agency's personnel for their discretion. 'I want to everybody to be clear: the people at the NSA, generally, are looking out for the safety of the American people. They are not interested in reading your emails. They're not interested in reading your text messages. And that's not something that's done. And we've got a big system of checks and balances, including the courts and Congress, who have the capacity to prevent that from happening.'"
Vote Ron Paul and squash the NSA, the Fed, and all these stupid agencies that seek to turn our world into 1984 (which some people seem to take it like it was a documentary).
Aka, tying the cat to the bacon. Clearly self-regulation is the way to go, after all it worked wonders for the financial sector.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
...but one day they might decide they are, and there is nothing in place to stop them from doing that. Does President Obama really not understand why people are outraged? And no, you don't really have a system of checks and balances- you have the illusion that you do. What happens when people in the NSA does something wrong/unconstitutional? Do they get fired? Arrested? I didn't think so.
...when he starts out by saying that the NSA spying on US Citizens is all reasonable and proper, since they don't actually read your emails or listen to your phone calls.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
they all play it safe by making this country less free in order to ensure no terrorist attack of any kind is does not happen on their watch. Maybe we all are to blame since we the people do not want to pay for the price of freedom which is a little risk.
...something both Demublicans and Repocrats may decry in public but can't resist using once in power.
In that respect Obama is Bush III.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
'Young people, rightly, are sensitive to the needs to preserve their privacy and to retain internet freedom. And by the way, so am I,' responded the President. 'That's part of not just our First Amendment rights and expectations in this country, but it's particularly something that young people care about..
This is a former constitutional lawyer saying that privacy concerns are a First Amendment concern. WT-actual-F? This is clearly Fourth amendment territory, but oh well. I mean, this is the president after all: we don't need facts when we have authority.
Also, the suggestion that this issue is all the more vital because young people care about it? What smarmy nonsense. It's a bloody constitutional crisis being characterized as an MTV award.
"1. The things that the NSA does are proper and justified.
2. We will strive to reduce the improper and unjustified things* the NSA does."
*Nothing
True, although that's not the default. Extradition, mostly for computer crimes, is based on the somewhat dumb theory that if something happens to an American computer, the perpetrator was "in" the USA for legal purposes, even if he or she has never actually visited the USA and has nothing to do with the country. There is also a small category of explicitly extraterritorial laws; for example, it's illegal, under U.S. law, for an American to travel to another country for the purpose of underage sex, as defined in the U.S. statute. Most laws aren't extraterritorial, though. If you murder someone in Germany, you won't be prosecuted under American homicide law, but German law. And if you smoke pot in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, you aren't violating U.S. drug laws.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
He is (of course) right that they're not spying "directly" on the American people, with an actual human being reading your emails, recording your online activities, and tracking your physical movements. But that's just a clever strawman. The goal is not to "watch" you (as your nosey neighbor does) -- the goal is to record you (as a computer would). The ultimate objective is to build a permanent profile on each and every citizen, so that IF and WHEN they have the political motive to prosecute you, all they have to do is press a few buttons, review your history, and select from any one of the thousands of laws available to prosecute you -- most of which are victimless crimes (crimes against the state), not crimes against other individuals.
How belittling it is to couple one of our most essential rights with the phrase "texting and-- you know, Instagramming". No, Mr. Obama, that is not why we want our privacy. We want our privacy because it was guaranteed to us. Any reason other than that is more reason than you deserve. I want my privacy because I have a RIGHT to privacy. End of discussion. It's appalling to see how this presidency completely obliterated some of our most important constructs: separation of powers, federalism, inalienable rights, etc. Barack ran a campaign on transparency. His administration has been the least transparent in decades. The Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle blowers then all other administrations combined. He promised to close Guantanamo, claiming that "going around laws" was just as bad as breaking them. Yet, he defends dragnet surveillance because it was done "outside our borders". Self-restraint. You have to be kidding me. This is literally infuriating.
Let me just say that I'm not exactly wretched with guilt over not respecting the IP of US companies, seeing as my data apparently is fair game to the US.
"Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws"
Uhm, I guess the laws of foreign countries, and international law don't apply to our spy organizations. I'm also sure the constraint of our laws (1st Amendment, 4th Amendment) can be ignored at will as well. After all we are just trying to find all the terrorists, right ?!? (You know like the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles - https://www.eff.org/press/releases/five-more-organizations-join-eff-lawsuit-against-nsa-surveillance)
As Ben Franklin put it, "They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
We need to simply shut down the NSA altogether, burn their records in effigy, and recall every elected official who ever voted in favor of their activities, or their funding.
Extradition, mostly for computer crimes, is based on the somewhat dumb theory that if something happens to an American computer, the perpetrator was "in" the USA for legal purposes, even if he or she has never actually visited the USA and has nothing to do with the country.
Funny how the NSA doesn't hold themselves to the same standard when they infiltrate systems outside of the USA.
'Young people, rightly, are sensitive to the needs to preserve their privacy and to retain internet freedom. And by the way, so am I,' responded the President. 'That's part of not just our First Amendment rights and expectations in this country, but it's particularly something that young people care about, because they spend so much time texting and-- you know, Instagramming.' The fact that the President thinks our desire for privacy and network neutrality is predicated on the ability to text and 'Instagram' other people is a little offensive, and just shows that he doesn't get it.
'The NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls. Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws.'
I read this as a VERY carefully worded line that rather than saying "the NSA is actually pretty reasonable" really says "if you think what we're doing in the US is bad, you should see what we're doing overseas." It practically comes out and says that they're doing all of those things "outside" the US borders. He also implies that all of the metadata collection that is done domestically is just fine.
Based on this, I would suspect that some program that the NSA agrees costs more that the intelligence gathered is worth is going to be cut, but overall nothing is going to change.
The actual spying isn't the biggest issue I have with the NSA (and GCHQ and ASIO and the others), the biggest issue is the way that these agencies are doing things that deliberately weaken computer security in the name of making it easier to spy on people.
Things like backdoors in who knows what software. Or pressuring software vendors under the table not to fix things that the NSA is using to spy. Or their various proposals for "key escrow" over the years. Or the potential compromise of security related algorithms and protocols (dual-ec-drbg for example is suspect and going back there were questions when the key-length of DES was made shorter by the NSA)
And lets not forget the cryptographic export controls (which still exist and can still be an impediment even if they have been wound back a bit) and what the government did to Zimmerman over PGP.
A have a friend who teaches political science and history at a state college. He has been asking his students how they feel about NSA surveillance and the majority opinion is summarized "I have nothing to hide, I'm not doing anything wrong, if it increases safety it's OK."
It doesn't sound to me like a lot of "young people" are taking a very strong civil-liberties position on this. The school he teaches at is a smaller state school (ie, not the main, big-name state university) so the student body tends to be more "mainstream" than the more leftish bias you might expect at the "prestige" main campus.
And when I raise the issue among my 40-something adult peers it's surprising how little people care and the "Where's your tinfoil hat?" look people give you.
"Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws."
and how is that working out for your foreign relations?
This. I find it appalling that this is seen as acceptable. The surveillance power that is now possible is not equivalent to anything we've seen before and changes the nature of the "lawless" foreign surveillance. Surveillance of foreigners used to mean having them spy on you when visiting their country plus some high value target monitoring in their own countries, but the cost and risk of surveillance enforced the selective nature of it. To treat every foreigner like an enemy is madness. For the most part non-US citizens felt that the US was an ally or at least harmless. Now the day-to-day decisions of all those people will take into account that the US is actively working against them. It won't be long before that is ingrained into the culture, tools and business practices of the rest of the world. Imagine the US being thought of as a worldwide Stasi: the day-to-day the common sentiment amongst the rest of the world will be "%*$k the US".
Complexity Happens
As a European, I did the one thing I could do, cancel the server I was renting in the US. Sorry to the very nice people who ran it but your government left me with no choice.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Does the NSA get around the restrictions on spying on US citizens by allowing/encouraging Great Britain (for example) to spy on us (and vice versa) and then sharing the data? If so, has that behavior been documented?
Obama, like all high-level politicians in the US, gave up his personal privacy as the entry fee for his chosen profession.
The difference between him and the rest of us is:
* He chose his privacy level. We can't.
* He has the power to make the government back off when they find something questionable. We don't.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Asking for evidence ad infinitum is also a common trolling tactic
...and making statements with no evidence, but claiming that the evidence is there for anyone who cares to find it, isn't a common trolling tactic?
You made a statement of fact, presumably because that fact is something you care for people to believe. So take a moment of your time to provide a link or two. Even if you're being "trolled" there will certainly be some non-trolls reading the comments as well who will learn from the link you provide.
Could you please send a note to the company in question, specifically telling them why you cancelled your service?
If this happens enough times, eventually US companies will start to poke the government about it.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"I'll be proposing more _self_ restraint." In other words, there will be no restraints. Restraint means there are rules on bad behavior that can't be broken without consequence. Self-restraint means there are no rules imposed on you by a third party, and it's up to you to decide whether the behavior is bad. The problem with self-restraint is that most government officials are deeply schooled in situation ethics, so whether behavior is acceptable is totally up to personal interpretation, personal goals, and personal motivation.
The promises "to initiate some reforms that can give people more confidence." In other words, as we have heard before, he believes it is a PR problem, and he has announced that his reforms, rather than changing things actually, will be mainly designed to change public perception of what they are already doing. At least he's being honest about it.
"The NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls." The NSA already said they pull in so much data it isn't possible for them to separate domestic from foreign traffic. It is on the order of petabytes. When he says they are not listening to phone calls, reading emails, etc., bear in mind they are recording and storing those very things. They just don't have a live person sitting in a chair listening to them right this moment. The only reason they supposedly aren't is because of the "self-restraint" he just mentioned. However, they can store that data as long as they like, until they discover a novel legal theory that says they can listen to it. With regard to the Snowden documents, the GCHQ has said they are "out there" and don't seem comforted by the self-restraint of the journalists that are filtering through them.
"Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws." False. It is constrained by treaties, which are like laws but enforced with nukes.