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."

Comments

Thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you Edward Snowden. Without your courage and patriotism we would not even have this level of change in effect.

Re:Thank you

[icebike]

Plus 1.

With an honest president, this guy would get a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
This president will give him 3 hots and a cot.

Re:Thank you

[icebike]

He hasn't released all of it. That's the only thing keeping him alive.
He's still alive to hold this dishonest administration's feet to the fire.

As much as useful idiots like you think it is more important to stand up and be muzzled in court and shipped off to solitary confinement in some forgotten corner of the prison system, the rest of us would like to hear the rest of the story about what this corrupt government is doing in our name.

Shame on you for suggesting stupid surrender instead of living to fight another day. George Washington is turning in his grave at your stupidity.

Re:Thank you

[Znork]

Yeah, and if that was what was going to happen, maybe Snowden would have stayed. Preferring to avoid torture followed by more torture followed by American prisonrape followed by some more torture does not cast a shadow on Snowdens heroic actions. He's certainly given up enough to prove his sincerity.

Re:Thank you

[AHuxley]

Staying in the USA was not an option. The security clearance US legal system would have sealed out the press, left Snowden with a perhaps some security cleared political interest and a short list of expensive cleared legal teams.
Over time all his efforts would have been lost and nothing would have been public but for some note in the US press over some security case.
Snowden has helped expose junk encryption products been sold around the world and induced US law reform to slowly look into Constitutional rights :)

Re:Thank you

[Jane Q. Public]

"Rosa Parks didn't flee from the bus when the police came for her; She sat right there and waited."

Holy crap. Rosa Parks? Really? I count that as a weird modification of Godwin's Law.

Rosa Parks wasn't facing life in solitary in Federal prison. At most she faced a night in jail... she had not even actually broken a law. There's a pretty fucking big difference.

Snowden, on the other hand, could not have revealed this information he did to the American public without breaking some serious laws. The fact that he was tattling on far vaster breach of the law nothwithstanding.

"Snowden stole a lot of classified materials from his employer, and then fled the country. And then he released all of it."

NO, he did not. He release SOME of it, to journalists who were entrusted to sift through it and determine what was proper to release. He has not released "all of it", even to those journalists, much less to everybody else.

"If I'm going to denounce my government's actions, I want the police to come. I want to be arrested, charged, and put on trial."

And given the current state of government in the U.S., you'd be tried as a "foreign combatant", tortured in Guantanamo, and NEVER SEE A PUBLIC TRIAL. Good luck with that. You're living in the dreamworld that the U.S. used to be.

Snowden got vital information out to the American public in the only way he reasonably could. Berating him for that is not just unrealistic, it's asinine.

Re:Thank you

[vadim_t]

It is entirely unimportant whether he's a coward or not. He released information that needed to be released, and that had an effect.

"anyone with half a brain realizes that the very definition of a spy agency is that it spies on people" -- of course, but there are some important bits here:

1. For a long time, people thought it only spied on foreigners. Americans supposedly had a right to privacy and needed a court order
2. Then people figured out that Americans were spied on too, and tried to go to the courts to stop it. But the courts refused because you need to have evidence of it happening. And how do you get evidence of that a secret government program is spying on you?

It's ridiculous to pretend that Snowden didn't release anything new. If he didn't, why are we talking about this? Why is there a panel, and why is the industry trying to convince the US President to have it stopped?

Re:Thank you

[Professr3]

A) You're assuming that you'd be given a trial by jury, rather than branded a traitor (aiding the enemy) and either kept in guantanamo or tried in a secret court. They would hold you up as an example - head on pike, as it were - to all others who might dare to expose their illegal actions. If you look at the history of civil rights leaders, you'll find that Rosa Parks wasn't just some random hero who stood up for herself one day; she volunteered and was chosen by community leaders to be a test case. They picked their timing, circumstances, and people very carefully - both from a legal and a public-relations standpoint. Whistleblowers have no such luxury; they find incriminating information and are immediately presented with an ethical quandary and the necessity to act.

B) Why are you lambasting someone for not wanting to go to prison and face "enhanced interrogation methods"? He discharged his ethical duty by telling us what he found. He doesn't owe us a damned thing more.

Re:Thank you

[tlambert]

This president will give him 3 hots and a cot.

Rosa Parks didn't flee from the bus when the police came for her; She sat right there and waited.

She didn't have to worry about extraordinary rendition to an extraterritorial prison like Gitmo, where case law has indicated that constitutional guarantees don't apply. He would potentially have to also worry about being killed by the U.S. government outright, as other U.S. citizens have been, for example, in Afghanistan without due process of law: http://rt.com/usa/us-government-drone-killing-660/

When Alabama told Martin Luther King they would arrest him if he marched, he marched anyway, and then got arrested.

And then was assassinated as soon as it was convenient, afterwards.

Re:Thank you

[FlyHelicopters]

Nonsense, the founding fathers of the United States didn't issue their Declaration of Independence then submit themselves to arrest, they would have all been taken to a tree and hung, and we'd still be British subjects today.

What Rosa Parks did was an act of courage, but she also wasn't committing a capital offence either. The founding fathers were. Snowden may not be executed for his crime, but he would spend the rest of his life in prison for it.

Yea, I'd rather not do that either.

Neither Rosa Parks nor Martin Luther King were facing a life prison term. If they were, they might have behaved differently.

Re:Thank you

[Bob9113]

Snowden's justification for his actions fall short of what a person truly concerned about civil liberties would have done. If I'm going to denounce my government's actions, I want the police to come. I want to be arrested, charged, and put on trial.

Two people prior to Snowden trusted the system, went through the official channels, and faced the music; William Binney and Thomas Drake. They were harrassed and prosecuted by the executive, marginalized and ignored by the major media. Their most significant achievement was making it clear to Snowden that he could not trust our legal system to seek truth and justice nor the old guard of the fourth estate to do its investigative duty.

Re:Thank you

[rtb61]

Whilst Snowden runs around free he is providing a solid message to other whistle blowers, it is possible to expose corrupt US government actions and survive. This if of course the main reason they target Snowden, not so much the criminal activity he exposed but emboldening others to similar actions. All those many others in similar positions need to spend some time looking into the mirror and decide what their heritage will be and what they will future they will be providing for future generations. When the government lies, cheats, steals and kills as is a threat to the democracy they are meant to represent, don't be a gutless coward or a servile minion, expose the crap out of them and bloody get away with it and that last part is just as important as the first part because it will encourage others to do the same. When enough follow suit, then it's the government criminals who end up behind bars and the whistle blowers who are free and celebrated as the heroes they are.

Re:Thank you

[shutdown -p now]

You forget to mention just how inept NSA turned out to be, both in its internal security procedures, and in their dealing with personnel.

I would be extremely surprised if, with that attitude, they didn't have swarms of bona fide foreign spies, Russian and Chinese and who knows what else. What better place to infiltrate than the one that does data mining on the entire country, yet cannot properly secure its own data banks? You don't even need to tap anything, just join and get the collected data out on USB sticks, like Snowden apparently did for years before he dropped the bomb.

Re:Thank you

[kermidge]

"It's their job to watch for threats both foreign and domestic."

Nope. Only NSA domestic tasking is to develop secure comms and crypto for use by military and State. Like CIA, they are forbidden to do deomestic intel gathering. By law, anyway.

Everything I've read in the past six months indicates that less than half of what he took has even been released to Greenwald et al, and they've released but a portion of what they're working with. But maybe you have better sources (no, that's not snide; you're a sharp cookie when you're on your game, so maybe you read something that I didn't.)

My understanding is that the purpose was not particularly to 'expose the NSA' as to expose such things that they are doing that are counter to, or an un-authorized expansion of, tasking, and done in violation of the several laws that apply, and perhaps, even likely, of the constitution under which those laws operate.

I mean, c'mon, while I know that Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace" was news to some when it came out back when, but the essentials of the basics of what the various intel agencies were doing was kinda obvious, not to mention stated outright in public documents. So long as there was no drama, things just went along quietly, is all. Thing is, going back to Church et al, historically those same agencies have a recurrent problem with both mission creep and off-the-books activity.

I'm enough of a realist to figure that there are some gray areas; that things can get nasty in the dark corners. But that's a long sight different than the wholesale vacuuming of every domestic electronic comm up to garage door openers. So far as has been reported, despite repeated questions from Congress, so far no information on terrorist activity leading to its disruption that could not just as easily and readily and legally be obtained by heretofore existing means and methods has been given. Further, claims to the contrary, no one has been shown to have been harmed by the disclosures, although certainly some reputations and business deals have been affected.

Look, I have no particular axe to grind here. I mostly tend to favor law and order; the right to privacy, the right to speak, the right to peaceably assemble, all without chilling consequences stemming from total surveillance.* I also tend to look with disfavor on over-reach and skullduggery. Quaint tho it may be, especially given the hypocrisy and, some would say, the corruption of Congress, I really don't like it when public officials lie to the only body that ostensibly is looking out for me, either.

  *(Btw, I recall few if any contemplating the heavy psychic load and attendant mental health problems that arise in such a state. (You ever talk to someone came out of East Germany? Not pretty.) We're already training our schoolchildren to accept such things as being arrested, handcuffed, and taken to jail from out of a fifth-grade class for doodling with a dry marker, along with invasive searches and withholding of needed medication; the list goes on. Then we have college free-speech zones requiring a two-week reservation and approval. Say what? That would have been popular in '70. Bad enough children have no childhood now; far worse is molding them to compliance with a totalitarian state by high school. Heck, looking back, I and most of my classmates would have been imprisoned or dead by fourth grade, way things work today. The times are not that different, but our collective heads are sure twisted up pretty bad to let this shit come to pass and think it somehow good and "justified". Only IMO, of course.)

Cool thing about panels.

[BrookHarty]

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

4th amendment?

[grasshoppa]

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.

Won't make a difference

[Darkk]

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.

 

Re:Won't make a difference

[AHuxley]

Yes recall how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office once exposed just drifted back into the shadows under new names, teams....
"However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 ..."

Without looking

[icebike]

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.

Snowden saved The Constitution that Obama defiled

[Brendan_Jones]

> 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.

Re:Bah!

[icebike]

Snowden has offered to help Brazil investigate US intelligence. Is that the patriotism you were referring to?

Why, yes, Yes it is.
Any spying on Brazil was for economic reasons, probably at the behest of corporations, not due to any threat to the US.
   

Re:Bah!

[Concerned Onlooker]

Fox news? You mean the same people who complain about too much government involvement until it's their kind of government involvement?

Also, we also have to thank Glenn Greenwald and we have to not-thank the US press for failing to be trustworthy enough to be government watchdogs.

Re:Bah!

[flyingfsck]

Yup, and as a consequence, Boeing just lost a 5 billion Dollar Brazillian aircraft order to the Swede SAAB.

You had it coming

[jopsen]

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...

Re:You had it coming

[Joce640k]

That is basically a strawman argument. Snowden hasn't provided any proof that the US engages in industrial espionage to directly benefit it's industry.

They've already been caught with their fingers in the pie a few times now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage

Re:You had it coming

[kilfarsnar]

That is basically a strawman argument. Snowden hasn't provided any proof that the US engages in industrial espionage to directly benefit it's industry.

Maybe Snowden hasn't, but others have.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/nsa-busted-conducting-industrial-espionage-in-france-mexico-brazil-and-other-countries.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130909/04383424450/latest-leak-shows-nsa-engaging-economic-espionage-not-fighting-terrorism.shtml

So, yeah.

Re:Bah!

[AHuxley]

LOL Brazil can buy whatever it feels it can afford on the international market. The upfront price and ongoing software, hardware maintenance costs are about all Brazil has to worry about.
The Brazilian nuclear work and advanced aerospace efforts are well known and very well understood by the USA - no nuclear weapons system but the US "let" Brazil keep working on nuclear subs and aerospace :)
As for links with China, Russia most countries will buy up any mil systems for sale gov to gov at any good price and with ongoing tech support, upgrades.
So no reason at all to be interested there, Brazil like any nation can buy into what ever it feels like unless bound by some international treaty e.g. nuclear.

Fuck that, shut them down.

[jcr]

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

Re:Bah!

[Tripkipke]

So the stupid outnumber the smart?

Those are not even recommendations

[Taco Cowboy]

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.

Re:Bah!

[daem0n1x]

Then next time try to compete on the grounds of merit, not by spying of your customers and competitors. Spend more money in research and less in espionage. Isn't that what "capitalism" is all about?

Re:Bah!

[daem0n1x]

Brazil is a sovereign country and they can cooperate with whoever the fuck they want. Wake up and smell the coffee. South America is no longer the United States' backyard.

Godwin's Law

[GrahamCox]

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.

Re:Godwin's Law

[N1AK]

The point of Godwinning references is that constantly comparing relatively minor infringements to mind-shatteringly large acts of inhumanity not only doesn't add to debates it quickly destroys them.

When I say something like "I don't think it is wrong for a country to have a leader with considerable powers" if the next response is "That's the sort of thing the NAZIS said, who are you hitler?" any reasonable discussion has ended.

Some events are significant enough that they rightly can be compared reasonably and maybe Godwin shouldn't be claimed in those cases, but until we get some relatively in internet discussions (lololololol) most comparisons to Nazism will be completely inappropriate and unhelpful.

There is something wrong with your brain.

[Pino Grigio]

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

[TheRealHocusLocus]

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.