Obama Announces Surveillance Reforms 359
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.
Re:Unless laws change (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Is it for real? (Score:4, Informative)
Read "Enemies: A History of the FBI" by Tim Weiner and you'll see that we have been through this BS before. Nothing changes.
Re:So the hell what? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [nytimes.com].
"No evidence of abuse has been found" (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously LOVEINT is one example. But more details are coming out about how David Patraues was caught having an affair because of "metadata" collected by the NSA.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/17/4111871/metadata-helped-reveal-gen-petraeus.html#.Utlud2nfqCg [charlotteobserver.com]
When Jill Kelley first reported getting threatening emails about Patraues, the FBI read all her emails as part of "a routine step".
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/us/from-petraeus-scandal-an-apostle-for-privacy.html [nytimes.com]
They didn't have a warrant to read her email, they just hacked into google and made a copy of everyone's email. If you report a crime to the FBI they read your email. Simple as that.
Re:So the hell what? (Score:5, Informative)
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):
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324904004578535670310514616 [wsj.com]
You can't rationally call rubber stamping like that "oversight."
It's not just the president, but gov. corruption. (Score:5, Informative)
The U.S. government has engaged in violence each year for more than 100 years, to make a profit for a few. Anyone desiring more information about that can, for example, read these highly rated books:
Overthrow: America's century of regime change [amazon.com] from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer
The brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their secret world war [amazon.com] by Stephen Kinzer
Re:I gotta love it! (Score:4, Informative)
This is true but Obama did support Bush on all patriot act stuff... he has always supported this kind of stuff... hell, if you can say one thing about the guy is that he doesnt flipflop around this particular issue.