Obama Announces Surveillance Reforms

In a speech today, U.S. President Barack Obama announced changes for the operations of the country's intelligence agencies. He says the current program will end "as it currently exists," though most of the data collection schemes will remain intact. However, the data collected in these sweeps will not be stored by the U.S. government, instead residing with either the communications providers or another third party. (He pointed out that storing private data within a commercial entity can have its own oversight issues, so the attorney general and intelligence officials will have to figure out the best compromise.) In order for the NSA to query the database, they will need specific approval from a national security court. Obama also announced "new oversight" to spying on foreign leaders, and an end to spying on leaders of friendly and allied countries. Further, decisions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will be annually reviewed for declassification. A panel advocating for citizen privacy will have input into the FISC. There will be chances to national security letters: they will no longer have an indefinite secrecy period. Companies will be able to disclose some amount of information about the NSLs they receive, something they've been asking for. Another change is a reduction in the number of steps from suspected terrorists that phone data can be gathered. Instead of grabbing all the data from people three steps away, it's now limited to two.

Comments

Re:Unless laws change

[Charliemopps]

Laws don't need to change. Most of this is already unconstitutional. They've just been using their "State secrets" argument to keep it from getting to the supreme court to get ruled on.

Re:So the hell what?

[noh8rz10]

what annoys me about this is obama is focusing on the phone data collection stuff. but what about PRISM, and the L3 infrastructure stuff, the new text message stuff (which is notable because it's content, not metadata), and all that jazz. he says the NSA's stuff is legal and he'll make a few adjustments, but he's ignoring all the ILLEGAL things they do. BTDubs the full text of the speech is at NYTimes.

Re:So the hell what?

[anagama]

The FISA court has been a whitewash since the Church Committee days. FISA rejects about one warrant per 3 year period (or 1 in 3000):

From 1979 through 2012, the court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has rejected only 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance applications by the government, according to annual Justice Department reports to Congress.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324904004578535670310514616

You can't rationally call rubber stamping like that "oversight."