Slashdot Mirror
Obama Administration Set To Expand Sharing of Data That NSA Intercepts (nytimes.com)
schwit1 writes: The Obama administration is on the verge of permitting the National Security Agency to share more of the private communications it intercepts with other American intelligence agencies without first applying any privacy protections to them, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
The idea is to let more experts across American intelligence gain direct access to unprocessed information, increasing the chances that they will recognize any possible nuggets of value. That also means more officials will be looking at private messages - not only foreigners' phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the NSA's foreign intelligence programs swept in incidentally.
Civil liberties advocates criticized the change, arguing that it will weaken privacy protections. They said the government should disclose how much American content the NSA collects incidentally - which agency officials have said is hard to measure - and let the public debate what the rules should be for handling that information.
The idea is to let more experts across American intelligence gain direct access to unprocessed information, increasing the chances that they will recognize any possible nuggets of value. That also means more officials will be looking at private messages - not only foreigners' phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the NSA's foreign intelligence programs swept in incidentally.
Civil liberties advocates criticized the change, arguing that it will weaken privacy protections. They said the government should disclose how much American content the NSA collects incidentally - which agency officials have said is hard to measure - and let the public debate what the rules should be for handling that information.
The former East German Stasi would be proud.
/s
Thank you President Obama for making govt surveillance of the citizenry the new normal, I'm sure with a history of political characters like McCarthy, Hoover, Nixon etc. that this won't be abused in the future.
Because racism
"His name was James Damore."
What's the complaint? Didn't he promise to be more transparent? He didn't say with whom
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wow and he's a Democrat? Scary
Bit like the Labour government we had here with Tony Blair, socialist morals led to the most authoritarian government in the UK since the war.
Socialism doesn't understand privacy or rights of the individual, you keep hearing about "the greater good".......
Being Mutual - Working together for a better society
There IS a movement to impeach Obama on exactly those grounds... except that is not the priority reason OR the main reason.
Nor is there anything to that spying on people wrong - it's Obama who is abusing the Patriot Act, not the Patriot Act that is abusive.
I don't agree with that conclusion. If the Patriot Act weren't abusive to begin with it would not be possible to use it like that.
Anything the government is allowed to do will always be stretched to the extreme. (Well, this is true for everyone else too, if it is barely legal it will be done.)
If the government says "Oh, this law technically allows for this, but we won't go that far." then they are lying.
I'm not saying that it wouldn't be justified to impeach Obama, but he is using the Patriot Act for it's intended purpose, not abusing it. The Act should never have been put in place to begin with.
I'm loving me some more of that "Hope and Change"....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You know this survalience hasn't really poanned out in regards to stopping "terrorism", look at France, San Berndino.
So I am left scratching my head exactly what use is this data?
I mean it's really only useful to spy on your population this way if you believe them to be the threat.
But why would a nation force fed illegal immigration, the shipping of jobs overseas, the repeated financial thefts by large banks who were then bailed out, illegal wars, and a massive growing security apparatus costing billions being built next to crumbling public infrastructure be a threat?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Uh, "Socialism doesn't understand privacy or rights of the individual". I think there is a very basic misunderstanding of what socialism is. Which is a system of economic priorities. China is even more capitalist than the USA (if you look at the actual culture and not the labels...might find a visit interesting..). And we all know how much the Chinese Party values the rights of the individual (or even the community). The USA hasn't really valued the rights of the individual since the "so called" Patriot Act was put into law (and renewed/strengthened several times since). Are we as a "capitalist" society (we aren't pure capitalist FYI, we bailed out Ford didn't we?) with our spying (without warrant or cause), imprisoning without due process under the guise of national security, rendition and basically declaring ourselves in a state of war (without actually legally declaring war against anyone in particular, or is that everyone?), respecting rights of the individual? France and Germany respect privacy rights far more. Perhaps more "socialism" would help bring more respect of privacy in the USA. "Capitalism" certainly isn't doing much of a job here. As I said before, neither economic approach has any real bearing on how rights of privacy being respected.Canada is consider in many way more socialist (although under Harper that was scary), and we still (to a lessor degree than we used to) respect privacy rights (as far as we know) more than in the USA. for now. Anyway, just something to think about.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein