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

All about saving face. Didn't even address prism.

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched the whole thing. He chose to focus on phone meta data collection and not even address prism and the likes of the new utah data center. The speech and these new "reforms" are all about preserving the NSA ecosystem (read money) that spends billions of dollars of tax payer money on programs we don't want. For christs sake they are tapping domestic fiber lines and siphoning everything into storage (including phone calls) and the language in the law doesn't even consider it a search until the data (that they already stored) is queried. He won't address it because they already spend billions on it and he who upsets the flow of money in washington might as well tie their own noose. The dollar sign is the new swastika.