Rating Obama’s NSA Reform Plan

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/18-6

Rating Obama’s NSA Reform Plan
by Cindy Cohn and Parker Higgins
Published on Saturday, January 18, 2014 by Deeplinks Blog



The Electronic Frontier Foundation's sorecard explained

Earlier today, President Obama announced a series of reforms to address abuses by the National Security Agency. We were heartened to see Obama recognized that the NSA has gone too far in trampling the privacy rights of people worldwide. In his speech, the President ensured that National Security Letters would not come with perpetual gag orders, brought new levels of transparency and fairness to the FISA court, and ended bulk collection of telephone records by the NSA. However, there is still much more to be done.

We’ve put together a scorecard showing how Obama’s announcements stack up against 12 common sense fixes that should be a minimum for reforming NSA surveillance. Each necessary reform was worth 1 point, and we were willing to award partial credit for steps in the right direction. On that scale, President Obama racked up 3.5 points out of a possible 12.

1. Stop mass surveillance of digital communications and communication records.

~snip~

In order to score a full point in this category, Obama would have needed to declare that the executive branch would no longer be using any of these authorities to engage in mass surveillance. He tackled only one of these issues somewhat: the surveillance of telephony metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Specifically, he acknowledged the recommendations of his review group that the government cease to collect and maintain a database of all Americans’ telephone records. He is ending that program, which is laudable. However, he left open the door to having telecom companies or another third party maintain a similar set of mass data, so even as to 215, we could not give him the full ⅓ of the point.

~snip~

3. No data retention mandate.

Obama’s review group recommended that the telephone metadata surveillance program be taken away from the government, suggesting that a third party or even telecom companies themselves be responsible for maintaining a searchable list of our calling records. This approach—mandating companies act as Big Brother’s little helper—won’t alleviate the serious privacy concerns with maintaining a digital record of every call we make.

[BlueStreak]

1. Giving the phone database to a 3rd party would be even worse

It is bad enough that an unaccountable part of government would be building vast data centers to store data on every single call placed in the country. It would be even worse if they were turned over to crony companies that are even less accountable than the NSA, if such a thing is possible.

Here's a concept. If you have probable cause that somebody is engaged in criminal activity, get a warrant and have the hone company send you THOSE records.

But what do I know about the Constitution? Obama is the brilliant Constitutional scholar here, and apparently the ideas of probable cause and warrants never occurred to him.