Obama Panel Said to Urge N.S.A. Curbs

[Indi Guy]

Source: New York Times

A presidential advisory committee charged with examining the operations of the National Security Agency has concluded that a program to collect data on every phone call made in the United States should continue, though under broad new restraints that would be intended to increase privacy protections, according to officials with knowledge of the report’s contents.

The committee’s report, the officials said, also argues in favor of codifying and publicly announcing the steps the United States will take to protect the privacy of foreign citizens whose telephone records, Internet communications or movements are collected by the N.S.A. But it is unclear how far that effort would go, and intelligence officials have argued strenuously that they should be under few restrictions when tapping the communications of non-Americans abroad, who do not have constitutional protections under the Fourth Amendment.

The advisory group is also expected to recommend that senior White House officials, including the president, directly review the list of foreign leaders whose communications are routinely monitored by the N.S.A. President Obama recently apologized to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for the N.S.A.’s monitoring of her calls over the past decade, promising that the actions had been halted and would not resume. But he refused to make the same promise to the leaders of Mexico and Brazil.

Administration officials say the White House has already taken over supervision of that program. “We’re not leaving it to Jim Clapper anymore,” said one official, referring to the director of national intelligence, who appears to have been the highest official to review the programs regularly...



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/world/americas/obama-panel-said-to-urge-nsa-curbs.html?_r=0

[mike_c]

1. whitewash....

eom

[QuestForSense]

2. Exactly the way it was set up to roll.

[blkmusclmachine]

8. 9/11 and NSA. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

[JDPriestly]

3. The massive collection of data on the communications of Americans is what I most object to.

And it looks like there is no end in sight to that.

That massive collection in the wrong hands could really harm a lot of people who live what they believe to be innocent lives. Have a gun? A feud with a neighbor? An angry divorce? We have seen revenge porn. How about avenging anger by messing with a person's record of communications? Could it be done? Personally I couldn't do it, but I'll bet there are people who could figure out how. Have a teenager in the house? That's a problem right there. The abuses and mistakes possible with this surveillance system in the wrong hands are unlimited.

This part of the article troubled me:

Mr. Obama asked the advisory group to determine whether the N.S.A. had overreached, putting new programs in place because it had the technological capability, rather than weighing the costs to privacy. “What’s coming back is a report that says we can’t dismantle these programs, but we need to change the way almost all of them operate,” said one official familiar with the advisory group’s instructions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/world/americas/obama-panel-said-to-urge-nsa-curbs.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0

What in the world do they want all that information for? When I try to think of possible reasons, I always return to the suspicion that their reasons are not compatible with our Constitution. The invasion of privacy inherent in collecting all the data on people's communications (even if you don't collect the content of the communications) is just horrible. The East Germans would have loved these programs. We should not put up with this. We should do everything we can to pressure Congress to stop these programs that are over-reaching. And the database of pen registers is the very worst of them.

[randome]

5. Carl Bernstein said it appears to him that the NSA has strong protections in place to prevent abuse.

Add more layers to that and be more forthcoming about how those protections are used in practice.

It makes sense to me, not being privy to what the NSA does with the metadata, that it would be useful to find co-conspirators of terrorists, money launderers, child pornography rings, etc.

Otherwise, they would need to go, in effect, 'door to door' to every telecom company in the country to find this information. The metadata is simply copies of what the telecom companies already keep.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[JDPriestly]

7. I used to work for a telephone company. Years ago.

I know exactly what is in those records.

And I don't think the government should have that information, not in these days of very fast computers.

While this information might be useful to identify co-conspirators, it would also be useful to identify people who exercise or support the exercise of speech rights.

If we had a president intent upon establishing a religious government of some kind, it could be very effective in identifying members of other, inconvenient religions.

It was probably very effective at locating those of us who followed the webcams of the Occupy Movement to say nothing of the cell phone activity of the people directly involved in that movement.

All the people on, say, President Obama's or Elizabeth Warren's mail-serve lists could be identified. It could identify who your neighbors are, where you live, where you used to live, all your relatives, etc. In fact, there already is at least one service that provides that information. Linking all the telephone numbers called from our phones, all the e-mail addresses from which and to which e-mails flow from our accounts -- that's a horrible lot of information for a government to possess about its citizens, to say nothing about an invasive amount of information for a private contractor to possess, for up to 35,000 people to have access to.

Let's say you are a member of Congress and you want to talk to a lawyer or a news reporter about some misconduct on the part of a sitting president to which you were a witness. Just calling the lawyer's office for an appointment could be a tip-off that you are the person who blew the whistle on the misconduct. And we have had presidents and will have presidents who pursue and try to destroy anyone who blew the whistle on their misconduct.

These programs attack the very bases of our democracy and of a healthy government in which all in the government are ultimately supposed to answer to the people.

There is no excuse for this program. I cannot believe that any person of good conscience could support or favor its continuance. And I am talking about the metadata portion of it in particular but the entire program in addition.

I would like to add in response to previous questions that many have raised: The reason that Showden did not blow the whistle in the conventional way was that he would have known that all his contacts, phone calls, etc., could be traced, that any contact with anyone with whom he communicated about his concerns would be discovered and cause him trouble.

[mitty14u2]

4. Key Internet Institutions Ditch US Leadership; Brazil To Host Global Summit To Draw Up New Governance

Here's a hugely important story that brings together three major threads. First, the continuing wrangling over the form that Internet governance should take. Second, the fact that NSA's massive surveillance operations around the world have included economic espionage. And third, Brazil's increasingly angry reaction to that spying. As a post from the Internet Governance Project explains:

the Directors of all the major Internet organizations -- ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries -- turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131014/08210124863/

Some Countries said they will close off the internet if spying does not stop, that would hit hard on trade until it's resolved, that would be equal to a world strike!

[Indi Guy]

6. ...And what kind of effect...

...would that have on national security?

[blkmusclmachine]

9. Notice how the "terr'ists" have all moved from Afghanistan to the USA???

This was the Original Plan. It's just been rolled out in phases to make it LESS OBVIOUS.

Which came first, the NSA or 9/11?