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Panel Urges Major NSA Spying Overhaul
wiredmikey writes "A board set up to review the NSA's vast surveillance programs has called for a wide-ranging overhaul of National Security Agency practices while preserving 'robust' intelligence capabilities. The panel, set up by President Obama, issued 46 recommendations, including reforms at a secret national security court and an end to retention of telephone 'metadata' by the spy agency. The 308-page report (PDF) submitted last week to the White House and released publicly Wednesday says the US government needs to balance the interests of national security and intelligence gathering with privacy and 'protecting democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.' Panel members said the recommendations would not necessarily mean a rolling back of intelligence gathering, including on foreign leaders, but that surveillance must be guided by standards and by high-level policymakers."
Thank you Edward Snowden. Without your courage and patriotism we would not even have this level of change in effect.
These are political reforms: it may look like something has changed, but it's business as usual.
They only make recommendations, nobody has to implement them.
Police chiefs do this all the time for police corruption. Look I'm putting a panel together to look into these problems and make recommendations. See! I'm doing something about it! Oh, the Union/Mayor/DA/etc wont agree, sad panda, I tried, vote for me again....
Playing the public like fools.
SSDD
I notice it says the goal is to "protect democracy*", but doesn't seem to mention the Bill of Rights or, specifically, the 4th amendment.
Telling, although not surprising.
* - It's possibly worth noting here that the United States is a republic, not a democracy.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Let them revamp NSA. It won't make a difference. What they will do is spill off some new top secret division that only top brass knows about. This won't change a thing.
Yup.
Viva la Revolución!
There is no change, those are only recommendations. Obama has yet to decide what to do. Even then it will take Congress acting to change much of it, assuming Obama decides to change anything.
Snowden has offered to help Brazil investigate US intelligence. Is that the patriotism you were referring to?
As to Snowden's fate, there are some other views about him.
Stop attacking US citizens. Stop attacking US corporations. You are doing more economic harm - in terms of revenue to cloud providers like Google, Cisco, IBM, and others - than the terrorists you're supposedly defending us against. It's bad enough they got your bosses to parlay $1-2B in damages to NYC and DC real estate into a faileld $1-2T military campaign, but the US economy can recover even from an insult like that. What you've been doing threatens the viability of the last growth industry the country has. If you throw us tech companies under the bus in your insatiable drive for more surveillance power, it's a cinch that your next boss, or your next-next-boss, or your next-next-next-boss, turns you into the very thing you've been trying your damndest to believe you haven't become. Do you really hate us for our freedoms the same way the terrists do, or the commies did? Without compromising your oath of secrecy, find people with grey hairs or bald heads about why they opposed the USSR and the DDR, and ask them why they fought the cold war. You've been fighting a war against "the terrists" (long after they've been effectively eliminated as a potential existential threat) so long you've forgotten why you were fighting in the first place. Please. Just. Stop.
Your faithful observer, Anonymous Coward.
The report is slashdotted, at the moment, but I would be willing to bet this is pretty much a white-wash, with no meaningful
changes, by insiders giving up stuff they don't need, or which no one could prove they have anyway, while protecting
everything they really want to keep, and largely ending up with the status quo.
I have no faith in an internal review in general and certainly not from this administration (the self proclaimed most transparent administration in history).
Regardless of what they say, you know this won't change till someone goes to jail. We need Judges impeached for violating their oath of office, we need career NSA brass fired 5 levels deep, we need bulldozers and wrecking balls to converge on Bluffdale Utah. We need every single request for corporations to turn over records to have a warrant issued by a non-secret court and the company empowered to notify each affected individual no later than 6 months after the request. If you can't build a case for arrest in 6 months its probably becaus they haven't done anything wrong.
This report deserves an immediate trip to the waste basket, and a "Warren Committee" empowered in its place.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Recommendation 18
We recommend that the Director of National Intelligence should
establish a mechanism to monitor the collection and dissemination
activities of the Intelligence Community to ensure they are consistent
with the determinations of senior policymakers. To this end, the Director
of National Intelligence should prepare an annual report on this issue to
the National Security Advisor, to be shared with the Congressional
intelligence committees.
They recommend that intelligence agencies do what policymakers tell them to do... and write a report about how they're doing what they're told!
Gah.
> privacy and 'protecting democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.'
LOL. As if they give a damn about any of those things!
Obama has set the dogs on Snowden (forcing down Evo Morales's plane like a Bond villain to try and catch him), but Obama has also violated the US Constitution itself. How much more serious can you get?
On the campaign trail Obama referred to himself as "a constitutional law professor" so he can't claim ignorance. Yet there is no penalty for him violating it; After years of accumulated abuse it'll eventually weave it's way to the US Supreme Court who will say "So don't do that then." What sort of a deterrent is that?
So what does happens when you give a left-leaning spokesmodel unfettered power and no accountability? SCOTUS J Brandeis on Absolute Power: "The objections to despotism and monopoly are fundamental in human nature. They rest upon the innate and ineradicable selfishness of man. They rest upon the fact that absolute power inevitably leads to abuse."
When the US founding fathers wrote the Constitution they wisely recognised the dangers of a despotic government, having just fought a war with one. The problem the US faces today is that despots ignore the law, and face no penalty for doing so.
Recommendation 20
We recommend that the US Government should examine the
feasibility of creating software that would allow the National Security
Agency and other intelligence agencies more easily to conduct targeted
information acquisition rather than bulk-data collection.
They'll look into looking into the possibility of not making a permanent record of every time I take a shit! What True Preservers Of Freedom these folks are.
Just fucking kill the NSA completely. We don't need them in the least. Stop it. Just stop.
You don't need overhaul. Just throw it away.
They still want bulk data collection. Only now there will be some more bureaucratic hurdles:
Recommendation 35
We recommend that for big data and data-mining programs
directed at communications, the US Government should develop Privacy
and Civil Liberties Impact Assessments to ensure that such efforts are statistically reliable, cost-effective, and protective of privacy and civil
liberties.
I don't believe any kind of "overhaul," laws, rules, pledges or courts can restrain the NSA. The opportunity is too enticing. The solution can only come from technlogical means. IOW, remove the opportunity through a better encryption infrastructure and lesser reliance on the goodwill of the service providers.
One effective legal means against an overreach by the NSA would be the reinstatement of the First Amendment. The NSA should not be allowed to put a gag order on people other than NSA employees. If NSA comes to visit, you should have the right to say it publicly.
It does f-all to the NSA spying outside the USA, which includes me. So I will continue to do my damndest to make things difficult for them. There is no law that commands a foreigner to submit to foreign gubmint spying.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yup, and as a consequence, Boeing just lost a 5 billion Dollar Brazillian aircraft order to the Swede SAAB.
Well, if the US government is spying on behalf of US companies, those companies cannot be trusted.
It's violation of the free market forces and clearly illegal. Their bids are obviously invalid.
The rest of the world owns Snowden a big thanks for exposing organized crime at this level.
And people in the US shouldn't worry about the money (from state-sponsored organized crime), but be ashamed of their country for the crimes you are committing against other (smaller) countries that considered the US to be their ally.
Be glad that Snowden exposed this, you have a chance to fix it now... otherwise what's next state-sponsored bribery, theft, sabotage of competitors, why not just invade a foreign country take all their gold? Laws must also apply when dealing with foreign citizens, countries and cooperations...
There will be a re-structuring keeping the same scope, tech, technicians, policy, actions, etc.
But all departments and responsibilities will have changed. Files will be misnamed and lost. Due to the restructuring no one will be able to get hold of anyone or anything or attribute specific responsibility. It'll all lead to a massive white-washing and plausible deniability for everyone involved on the side of the NSA, randing from the cleaning personal to presidents.
"Brill: The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there. At least it'd better be."
This organization has proven that they have no regard at all for the law. One of the fuckers actually told a reporter a few days ago that he thinks the first amendment should be "revised" to make the NSA's job easier.
NSA apparatchiki have committed billions of felonies, and continue to do so as we speak. The only remedy that will make them stop is to disband them altogether.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There is no change, those are only recommendations
The panel is a dog and pony show.
It's a circus-like entity to fool us into believing that "CHANGE IS COMING" while actually there will be NO CHANGE.
They understand that the people are VERY UNHAPPY about what NSA has done to us.
They understand that they can't go on doing the same old things the same old ways - but they also know that they have to CONTINUE TO DO THE SAME OLD THING, that is why they put up this fucking dog-and-pony panel publicly stating their so-called "82 recommendations" and hope that by doing so people will be "satisfied" and will not pay so much attention to what they do anymore.
I can bet every last penny that I have that at the end of it the SAME OLD THING WILL STILL BE DON and the only difference is that THEY WILL DO THE SAME OLD THING IN A NEW METHOD.
Or to put it another way --- even after Obama approved all the 82-recommendations (even if it's 820,000 recommendations) the end result will be SAME WINE IN DIFFERENT BOTTLES.
The only effective thing that we need right now is to CHANGE THE SYSTEM.
Anything short of that --- ie., keeping the same old system --- will not work, because it's be manned (and womenned) by the same batch of fuckers, and they will be continuing what they do.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"surveillance must be guided by standards and by high-level policymakers"
So, if I'm reading this summary correctly, the only real problem is that our chickenshit congress never tripped over its own feet in a rush to hand the executive branch these exact powers in some most-assuredly extra-patriotic piece of legislation? All the issues with this law will go away if it gets a stamp of approval?
On a second note, why is it that nobody seems to mind (or make laws against) treating the inhabitants of other countries to police-state surveillance, including the heads of sovereign states?
The text recommends that Congress should end such storage [bulk telephony metadata] and transition to a system in which such metadata is held privately for the government to query when necessary for national security purposes. How will that privately held system be described? How many years does the private providers and private third parties need to keep records around and more importantly which records? Can under the recommendations of the panel a E-mail provider like Lavabit exist that keeps records in encrypted form and has a business model of destroying all records and traces on request of their customer? Under which circumstances must they surrender the customer data over to the government? Can they inform their customer about such an event?
None of these safeguards pro privacy would make legitimate surveillance of suspected wrongdoers where consequences of their actions can harm a lot of innocent civilians or government personnel any harder or impossible (I think the word terrorist is inflated to the point of being meaningless, so I refuse to use it for this purpose).
Before 9/11 we didn't have extreme amounts of such dangerous wrongdoing activity more than after 9/11, yet secret services where extremely much more careful with the privacy of innocent citizens before 9/11 than after. Is the claim that before 9/11 citizens didn't communicate (because electronic communication was less than today), and therefor the 'changing world' implies more communication so more surveillance needed and less privacy allowed? Because if that's the claim of the head of secret services to why he changed the United States in a surveillance state, my counter argument would be that it's idiotic and that being an idiot he shouldn't have such an important role in society. Then again, he offered his resignation last summer. I guess that's the least he should have done.
I count that as a weird modification of Godwin's Law.
Maybe, but can I just make a point about Godwin's Law? If the moment somebody mentions Nazis, the STASI, Pol Pot or any other extremist regime and is immediately "Godwinned", how are we to learn anything from these terrible historical precedents? If the actions of a supposedly democratic government really can be compared to Nazism, etc, then "Godwin's" is just a way to shut down debate about that. Just how badly does somebody need to act before the comparisons are apt? How will we know?
Personally, I think with the recent revelations about the NSA et. al., I think it's high time that Godwin's Law was at least reconsidered, if not outright repealed.
With an honest president, this crap would have been stopped long before a Snowden would have appeared
America is my country and I know this for a fact - my country is famous for having its own presidents assassinated.
Abe Lincoln and JFK, remember ?
Only crooks can become the POTUS.
Honest ed will never last a day in La Casa Blanca.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Thank you parça kontör fatura ödeme merkezi
I find it extremely interesting that Appendix E of that report does not discuss the NSA's role (or not) in twiddling with Dual EC DRBG. It's the only crypto component that they've been explicitly called out on, and it's not discussed.
To my knowledge, anything that can be described as a recommendation is non-binding. Considering the nature of the NSA, I'd say the report is currently as binding as toilet paper. I think I'll go ahead and print a few copies since I just ran out of it.
Why such a weird analogy? Why not just used Bradley Manning? He's in jail for 35 years..
The only thing that would help is defund the data centers and facilities and personnel used for global blanket data collection and analysis.
As long as they have the means to violate everyone's privacy, they will do so. It won't change a thing that there will be a wristslap once every few years and some scapegoat.
If the machine is there, it will be run. You'll notice that the report also focuses on what to do about "unauthorized disclosure". Unauthorized disclosure would not matter if there was an intent to stop illegal, unconstitutional and human right violating activities for good.
All governments are spying on all other governments, especially when it comes to what they consider are their vital economic interests. No doubt Brazil has a spy agency spying on US corporations too (shock!). Germany is spying on Britain. Britain is spying on France. France is spying on the US. The US is spying on Brazil. Brazil are spying on Chile. Chile is spying on Argentina. Argentina is spying on China. China is spying on absolutely everyone. Indeed, China has a MASSIVE on-going espionage operation, across corporate, governmental and military interests.
What shocks me more than spying is the fact that so many people on slashdot seem to have only become aware of it when Snowden leaked. I'm guessing you were either asleep during the Cold War or not yet born. Either that or wilfully ignorant, or just plain stupid. I suspect the latter, because frankly the naivete you and others show here is simply breathtaking.
I vote we skip directly to Chapter 7 of the United States Moral Bankruptcy Code.
The backbone tapping mechanisms that make large scale surveillance on Americans must be completely disclosed and dismantled. An egregious capital crime has been committed by NSA for which no clemency or 're-structuring' is possible.
If a new spy agency is built, it must be from pieces of the smoking wreckage of NSA.
If we can execute the Rosenbergs we can try and execute the NSA, which has done more to put us in harm's way than the Soviet's possession (and ultimate non-use) of nuclear weapons.
Building turn-key mechanisms for a Police State is a capital crime. It provides aid and comfort to our enemies. All of them at once.
Full dissolution, full dismantling of taps, dark fiber and facilities.
That is how the Balance is kept.
Our move.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
What they're talking about is continuing to mass collected data on all Americans but doing it via the private sector which has even LESS transparecny.
There is already a very wide consensus that the SYSTEM needs to be overhauled, that is why them power-that-be set up this fake "panel" to issue fake "recommendations" as a deceitful move.
There will be no change, no matter what this fake panel does and no matter how many of the fake "recommendations" Obama fakely "adopted".
The issue at hand is, how to totally overhaul the SYSTEM ?
The power-that-be is so entrenched - both the Republicans (supposedly representing the right side of the aisle) and the Democrats (supposedly representing the other side) are in this together.
Heck, even the Libertarian party is probably involved in the sham.
It isn't that I long for the "good old time" but Fox Mulder's "Trust No 1" should be what the number 1 thing the citizens of America should take heed of.
We can no longer trust anyone, not even the President, who, before he was the President, told us that he was well versed with the Constitution.
Back to reality, the only thing he's likely to get is a very long prison sentence.
The worst thing that would happen is that he suddenly approaches room temperature.
The only remedy that will make them stop is to disband them altogether
Shutting down the NSA is no longer sufficient !
They have such control over all the apparatus right now that even if we managed to shut down NSA now they can set up a super-NSA the very next minute - and they can do it totally LEGAL (remember, they have total control over the LAW ) and there is NOTHING we can do about it.
What is required is much more than shut down the NSA - what is truly required is a TOTAL OVERHAUL to the ENTIRE SYSTEM !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Panel members said the recommendations would not necessarily mean a rolling back of intelligence gathering, including on foreign leaders, but that surveillance must be guided by standards and by high-level policymakers.
It does mean that it would roll back vital intelligence gathering. Unfortunately, it also means that said rollback would allow another event of the 9/11 scale to slip through, never mind the 50 events stopped by the NSA, due to the bureaucracy of getting the "proper paperwork".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"Retention" and "Collection" do not mean the same thing.
Dear Girl-in-training,
Here's the thing people don't get about Snowden: He's not a revolutionary, or a hero. He's a coward.
It is entirely too freaking easy to accuse Mr. Snowden as a coward.
But before you point that accusing finger of yours at Mr. Snowden, why don't you ask yourself "What are you" first ?
At the very least, Mr Snowden has exposed the wrongdoings of the power-that-be.
What have you done that can even begin to compare to what Mr. Snowden has done ?
Are you going to join Cold Fjord in becoming NSA's sock-puppet, Ms. Girl-in-Training ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What about the vast data/computer centers, costing billions of dollars, which the NSA has constructed? Most of this infrastructure is designed to support their current nefarious methods of intelligence gathering and it will not just disappear with the wave of some bureaucratic wand.
Only when we see this giant infrastructure being dismantled (ha, ha) can we be sure that true reform is being implemented.
He hasn't released all of it. That's the only thing keeping him alive.
Doubtful. The NSA knows what information he had access to and what he has released. They will have to take the same security measures either way because they have to assume the information will be released if it hasn't already. They also have to assume the information either is or will become public.
NSA is Obama's ticket to become the first Trillion Dollar Man in terms of wealth, garnered from U.S.A. citizens bank, credit, insurance and social security accounts (see Target Co. et al.) hacked by NSA.
Secondly, NSA is the linch pin for the Democratic National Committee to steal the next election and they wont let NSA go just because of an internal propaganda report.
The same thing that happens when you give a right-leaning spokesmodel unfettered power and no accountability. The Bush administration started the escalation of spying powers with the PATRIOT Act and kept escalating and expanding those powers for seven years. Get over your partisan bias and recognize that this problem exists regardless of which side of the aisle our numbnuts in power came from.
Am I reading that right? The "rule of law" is getting "balanced" by something else? I didn't think LAW was negotiable? Maybe that's the problem here? Someone's trying to "strike a balance" between legal and national security?
Government policy shouldn't be trying to draw a line between security and legality. Legality is THE LINE that is not crossed over, ever. If you can't do it legally, that means you shouldn't BE doing it. The correct response is not to consider bending the laws.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
America has a history of using political power for economic gains. Just look at the treaties we propose that do nothing but help a few media companies...
It's QUITE obvious the NSA was spying on people/countries at the behest of corporations to further their economic policies. Duh.
And yes, I think that should be wrong and I'm GLAD Boeing just lost a 5bil aircraft order. Brazil should be free to vote with it's money, and when Boeing starts complaining to congress, that'll get HEARD far more than some Brazillian diplomat whining. It's a good move on Brazil's part.
I wish the American people would vote with their dollars too. Shit would get done around here.
This comment from certified idiot and congresscritter Maxine Waters from somewhere around the elections - well before the Snowden leaks came out.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=49a_1360284775#comment_page=4
Considering that the massive database the NSA has built has been useless to catch terrorists they wouldn't otherwise have caught, I think Maxine's comments are put into a whole new light, are they not?
"The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life," Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday. "That's going to be very, very powerful," Waters said. "That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They're going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can't get around it. And he's [President Obama] been very smart. It's very powerful what he's leaving in place."
Land of the free to do what exactly? Vote? You're funny.
Don't count on these reforms to do any good. Even Sen. Wyden won't push to eliminate the NSA and the surveillance programs entirely. We are in a post-patriot era. The individual isn't benefited by surveillance or nationality. The tech/Web communities were already cold towards the NSA, especially since revelations in 2005. Now corporations, IETF, academics, nations, and others and have an aligning interest in promoting encryption, while the NSA's mission(s) are in jeopardy (they feel they are being thrown under the bus by Obama). It's a great time to beef up anonymity and encryption over the Internet. There will always be security vulnerabilities lurking in software, collected by the NSA and other intelligence agencies, but we just gained ground in the game of cat and mouse.
As for criminals and terrorists using the darkerwebz, if you are here, you are basically already both. You're a bogeyman and a subversive, well on the way to becoming an outlaw.
The challenge that the US faces today is that citizens have been conditioned to a nanny state and to trust in the Governments ability to do what is best for them and never to abuse the powers they have been allotted. IN short, they fail to recognize that what the founding fathers experienced could and would ever happen to them, hence the things are different now analogies when giving up liberties that protect us from them to protect us from a faceless enemy.
Everyone's doing it, so it's OK? No. No no no.
People have been aware of it for a long time. We all knew. Snowden's actions forced others to act, and that is a good thing.
Maybe you should insult people less and listen more.... If we're naive in wanting our government to behave, what are you for seeming to make excuses for their behavior?
partisan bias? Only that I would have expected a right-leaning spokesmodel to do it. I would have hoped a left-leaning spokesmodel who preached 'Hope and Change' wouldn't. Ryoma Sakamoto said "A statesman must be pure of heart." Obama isn't.
It isn't a strawman, but a new argument
Excuse me, Mr. Cold Fjord,
We have read many of your comments, and we have yet to find ONE SINGLE ARGUMENT.
You are here not to discuss. You are not here to debate.
You are here as a NSA shill to spread the lies for NSA.
That is what you are, Cold Fjord, a shrill for the NSA.