Huffington Post has an article about how President Obama is meeting with many of the biggest Congressional critics of the NSA surveillance programs to discuss their concerns. However, on Wednesday he also met with larger groups in the House and Senate, where he continued to stand behind the programs. At the very bottom of the article is this stunning tidbit:
Obama reiterated his call for a “balance” between privacy and national security, but also invoked the Boston Marathon bombings as an example of where data collected by the NSA helped “identify whether there was a great plot.”
Right. So, after there was a bombing which no intelligence agency spotted beforehand, he’s now claiming that the NSA got to jump into action to find out that there wouldn’t be any more bombings because there was no bigger plot. We’re not even in the silly debunked realm of “preventing terrorist events” anymore. Now we’re at “Great work everyone! We found out that there’s no larger plot to worry about — sorry about the explosions and related mess.” Using the discovery of a lack of further threats after a bombing happened undetected to justify spying on all Americans? That’s crazy.
When that’s the best you can do to defend this program, something is clearly wrong. The program didn’t prevent the bombing. It may have allowed law enforcement to be more confident that there wasn’t a larger plot behind it slightly faster than regular police work did, but that’s not exactly a reason to violate everyone’s privacy, now is it?
The folks from the Sunlight Foundation have noticed that the Change.gov website, which was set up by the Obama transition team after the election in 2008 has suddenly been scrubbed of all of its original content. They noted that the front page had pointed to the White House website for a while, but you could still access a variety of old material and agendas. They were wondering why the administration would suddenly pull all that interesting archival information… and hit upon a clue. A little bit from the “ethics agenda”:
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
Yeah. That statement seems a bit embarrassing at the very same time Obama’s administration is threatening trade sanctions against anyone who grants asylum to Ed Snowden. Also… at the same time that we get to see how whistleblower Bradley Manning’s “full access to courts and due process” will turn out. So far, it’s been anything but reasonable, considering that the UN has already condemned Manning’s treatment as “cruel and inhuman.” And people wonder why Snowden left the country…
Okay, someone in the White House just feels like giving people who believe in protecting civil liberties a giant middle finger today. As a quick review, the President and the administration have been hiding behind secret court orders with secret interpretations of the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act to use a very blunt instrument: collecting pretty much all digital data around, and keeping the whole thing totally quiet for years. In response, Rep. Justin Amash is seeking to pull funding from one of the key NSA programs — the one that involved a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act by a secret court to pretend that language that clearly applied to only limited data now meant the NSA could order AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others to hand over every call record on every phone call. And, this is a program that no one knew about until Ed Snowden leaked it to the Guardian and the Washington Post.
Okay, having reinforced those basic points, check out the giant “screw you guys” the White House just pushed out in the form of a “statement” in response to the Amash Amendment. I’ll bold the key guffaw-inducing lines:
In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens. The Administration has taken various proactive steps to advance this debate including the President’s meeting with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, his public statements on the disclosed programs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s release of its own public statements, ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt’s speech at Brookings, and ODNI’s decision to declassify and disclose publicly that the Administration filed an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress.
However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.
Let me repeat that again: This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. As opposed to the blunt process of collecting all data on everyone which was arrived at via an “informed, open and deliberative process — known as totally secretly interpreting the plain language of a law in a secret ruling from a secret court to mean something almost entirely different than what the language itself said?
This is a joke, right?
Only someone who really has a sick sense of humor would try to argue that a bill looking to slow down the rampant spying on pretty much all Americans comes from a lack of an “informed, open, or deliberative process” when the process to create that massive surveillance infrastructure was all done in complete darkness.
Over the last few years, we’ve covered President Obama’s war on whistleblowers, including the fact that he’s used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers more than every other President combined, which is really quite incredible when you think about it. The NY Times has tried to dig around and figure out why the Obama administration is so harsh on whistleblowers and comes up with a few different sources. The first one, the Times reporter actually buries pretty far down in the story: Senator Dianne Feinstein from California:
At a closed hearing in December 2009, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, scolded Mr. Holder, Mr. Blair and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller, saying they had not adequately protected national security secrets.
“A tipping point was reached in 2009,” said one knowledgeable Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman. “There was an official change of policy.”
Mr. Blair said, “We had to do 50 push-ups and promise to do better.”
Of course, as we’ve pointed out a few times, Feinstein, ridiculously, seems much more concerned about leaks than the government abuses and lawbreaking that those leaks reveal. That’s quite incredible when you think about it.
The second source — also underplayed by the article — is officials in the intelligence community itself, who the President and his top advisors seem somewhat in awe of, and rarely seem willing to push back on what they have to say:
In tracing the origins of this effort, present and former government officials said the focus on leaks began at the administration’s highest levels and was driven by pressure from the intelligence agencies….
Basically, the long term intelligence insiders were sick of leaks — such as the revealing of their warrantless wiretapping — meaning that they actually have to answer to the public for overreaching into everyone’s private lives. Given the combination of those intelligence agencies and Feinstein (who has always parroted whatever the intelligence agencies have to say), President Obama put his first Director of National Intelligence on the job of “solving” this issue of whistleblowers. And Blair apparently took to it with fervor, believing that the best thing to do would be to “make some examples” by hanging people:
Soon after President Obama appointed him director of national intelligence in 2009, Dennis C. Blair called for a tally of the number of government officials or employees who had been prosecuted for leaking national security secrets. He was dismayed by what he found.
In the previous four years, the record showed, 153 cases had been referred to the Justice Department. Not one had led to an indictment.
That scorecard “was pretty shocking to all of us,” Mr. Blair said. So in a series of phone calls and meetings, he and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. fashioned a more aggressive strategy to punish anyone who leaked national security information that endangered intelligence-gathering methods and sources.
“My background is in the Navy, and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others,” said Mr. Blair, who left the administration in 2010. “We were hoping to get somebody and make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop.”
While he’s not literally talking about hanging someone, just the idea that they set out, purposefully, to “make examples” out of whistleblowers, is what lead to these kinds of massive overreaches and the chilling effects found today. The administration may think that’s a good thing, because it keeps their secrets secret — but it’s also what’s allowed massive abuses within the government to flourish with no one willing to blow the whistle.
The next culprit outlined (and mentioned above) is Attorney General Eric Holder, who teamed up with Blair to craft a program that was focused on going after anyone they could very aggressively:
Mr. Holder’s “attitude, the same as mine, was to speed up the process and make it more effective,” Mr. Blair said. “So, yes, that would mean more aggressive prosecution.”
The Justice Department imposed a tight deadline to decide whether to open criminal inquiries into leaks, shortening to just three weeks a review process that had often dragged on for months. Leaks considered unworthy of prosecution were marked for administrative inquiries. Underscoring the administration’s determination, Robert M. Bryant, Mr. Blair’s national counterintelligence executive, was put in charge of stanching leaks.
So, rather than get the whole story, understand what’s going on, the DOJ has a three-week deadline before moving forward with criminal investigations on whistleblowing.
The final person to blame for all of this: the President himself. As noted above, he seems to accept everything the intelligence guys tell him without question. And that leads to absolutely moronic claims like the following:
The White House has kept a careful distance from the Justice Department prosecutions, but President Obama seemed unwavering in his support for them. When government transparency advocates told him in March 2011 that chasing whistle-blowers was sullying his record, the president disagreed, saying some disclosures had been very damaging to national security.
The Times reporter doesn’t dig into this, but that meeting from March 2011 was first written about in Jane Mayer’s amazing New Yorker article about the ridiculous prosecution against whistleblower Thomas Drake. That was a case where Drake legitimately blew the whistle on fraud and abuse within the NSA — and it was only in searching for who was behind a different leak, that investigators found a completely pointless document on his home computer, including details of some meeting schedules. The document was marked unclassified, but prosecutors said that Drake should have known it was actually classified (even though the document was declassified months later).
That was clearly an extreme case of going after a whistleblower for being a whistleblower — and yet when confronted on this, the President strongly pushed back against it and seemed to buy completely into the bogus claims his intelligence people were telling him about Drake. From the Mayer piece:
On March 28th, Obama held a meeting in the White House with five advocates for greater transparency in government. During the discussion, the President drew a sharp distinction between whistle-blowers who exclusively reveal wrongdoing and those who jeopardize national security. The importance of maintaining secrecy about the impending raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was likely on Obama’s mind. The White House has been particularly bedevilled by the ongoing release of classified documents by WikiLeaks, the group led by Julian Assange. Last year, WikiLeaks began releasing a vast trove of sensitive government documents allegedly leaked by a U.S. soldier, Bradley Manning; the documents included references to a courier for bin Laden who had moved his family to Abbottabad—the town where bin Laden was hiding out. Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy.”
Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, attended the meeting, and said that Obama’s tone was generally supportive of transparency. But when the subject of national-security leaks came up, Brian said, “the President shifted in his seat and leaned forward. He said this may be where we have some differences. He said he doesn’t want to protect the people who leak to the media war plans that could impact the troops.” Though Brian was impressed with Obama’s over-all stance on transparency, she felt that he might be misinformed about some of the current leak cases. She warned Obama that prosecuting whistle-blowers would undermine his legacy. Brian had been told by the White House to avoid any “ask”s on specific issues, but she told the President that, according to his own logic, Drake was exactly the kind of whistle-blower who deserved protection.
Of course, Brian was exactly right — Thomas Drake was exactly the kind of whistleblower President Obama claims he wants more of: the kind who reveal government wrongdoing in the form of financial shenanigans. And yet, he never seemed to recognize or acknowledge that Drake never revealed anything that jeopardized national security. Given how the various intelligence bosses — from Blair to Keith Alexander to James Clapper (and their various predecessors who are now making tons of money working for private defense contractors bilking billions from the government on these issues) — seem to have decided that they need to “hang” a few leakers, President Obama’s failure to recognize that they’ve been using his support for this to hang true whistleblowers, rather than anyone who’s harmed national security, means he needs to take the blame for this massive failure within his own administration.
Brian was completely correct in her statements. These actions — and the latest Snowden revelations of a President who seems to cave to the intelligence agencies at every chance — really do a massive amount of harm to his legacy. But, tragically, the President appears to have a huge blindspot on that, not realizing how damning his war on whistleblowers has become.
It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve seen Xtranormal videos, but someone who shall remain nameless has put together a rather hysterical video of President Obama explaining why massive NSA surveillance under his watch is different than when it was done by President George W. Bush. As you may recall, President Obama criticized these programs while he was “Candidate Obama,” but has now expanded them massively. This video explains why — and is likely to make you laugh:
Below are some of my favorite lines… which is actually nearly a full transcript, because as I was picking out “favorite” lines, most of the video fell into that category.
It was concerning when the Bush administration was secretly collecting your information. Heck, I had concerns back then myself. But, everyone knows that George W. Bush was not a good President. Whereas, I am a good President. See the difference? So, while you could not trust George W. Bush to secretly collect your data, you can trust me. I’m a trustworthy guy.
Another important difference between my administration and the Bush administration is that when the Bush administration secretly spied on you, the Bush administration could not point to a single judge willing to say their program was legal. We, on the other hand, can point to such a judge. I’m not going to tell you who this judge is, or why he or she thinks our program is legal. If I did that, it would, obviously be harder for me to convince you that the program is legal. Instead, I’m just going to tell you that we secretly found one judge who was willingly to secretly say that it was legal for us to collect all of your data….
The Bush administration could not tell you that it had informed Congress. Whereas my administration took steps to ensure that if you ever found out about our secret surveillance program, we could tell you that we informed Congress. To be clear, when I say ‘we informed Congress,’ I am not saying that we did out best to ensure that Congress had enough information to have an informed debate on this vital national security issue. What I am saying is that we informed Congress enough for me to stand here and tell you that ‘we informed Congress.’ What Congress actually knew is not important….
If Congress did not want us to secretly interpret the law, then Congress should not have passed a law for us to secretly interpret….
If you, the American people, did not want me to secretly collect your data, then you should not have elected me President. Yes, I know many of you were probably unaware that I wanted to secretly collect your data, especially since I said I would not secretly collect your data. But, I choose to believe that you elected me to be your President, because you believe that if someone has to secretly collect your data, that someone should be me. And, as we all know, my secret interpretations of your support are more important than the reasons you actually supported me.
Finally, while I do not believe there is any reason to debate this issue, I will tell you that I welcome a debate on this issue. In fact, I’m so grateful that Edward Snowden started this debate that I have decided to stop at nothing to ensure he spends the rest of his life in a federal prison.
When the news of the US spying on EU embassies and various other official buildings came out over the weekend, we noted that this really wasn’t that surprising, as it appeared to be very typical espionage — the kind that has happened for decades, if not centuries. Still, it’s not entirely clear that President Obama’s response to this controversy is particularly tactful. He basically uses the “hey, come on guys, we’re all doing this to each other, right?” excuse:
“We should stipulate that every intelligence service – not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there’s an intelligence service … here’s one thing that they’re going to be doing: they’re going to be trying to understand the world better and what’s going on in world capitals,” he told a press conference during a long-scheduled trip Tanzania. “If that weren’t the case, then there’d be no use for an intelligence service.”
“And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That’s how intelligence services operate,” Obama added.
While I still think that this particular revelation is hardly that surprising, and agree that it’s almost certain that various European countries are doing the same sort of thing to the US, I do wonder if that’s the most tactful response to the growing controversy. Still, I do wonder if the focus on this will take away from the much larger issue of using intelligence services not to spy on other governments, but on the public via mass dragnet collections of information.
This is odd. In talking about Ed Snowden, President Obama referred to him as a “hacker.” After being asked about what kinds of efforts the administration was making to capture Snowden, the President (thankfully) claimed that they weren’t going to go too crazy over it, but chose an odd descriptor for Snowden:
“I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” he told reporters during a news conference in Senegal.
Leaving aside the fact that Snowden recently turned 30, calling him a “hacker” seems like a calculated move to try to reframe these leaks as something nefarious where someone “broke in” to get classified info, rather than a whistleblower on the inside, who saw what was going on, the widespread abuses, the lying to the American public and Congress, and decided to do something about it. This attempt at reframing whistleblowing is all too consistent with the administration’s practice of declaring war on whistleblowers.
We recently had a video showing then Senator Joe Biden, from seven years ago, “debating” the current President Obama on government surveillance. I hadn’t seen this until now, but someone else has put together a much better video showing Presidential candidate Obama in 2008 vs. President Obama in 2013. The difference is stark.
Not only is there a massive difference in what’s being said, but also in how it’s being said. The Candidate Obama spoke clearly, directly strongly and without equivocation about protecting civil liberties and not giving up our freedoms. President Obama’s speech, on the other hand, sounds weak, vague and unpresidential in comparison. In the first one, he makes these clear, declarative announcements:
This administration puts forth a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.
But as President, he says (while rolling his eyes — the video is incredible):
You can’t have 100% security… and then also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience…. We’re, we’re going to have to make some choices.
As a candidate:
I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies the tools they need to take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedoms. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. That means no more national security letters to spy on Americans who are not suspected of committing a crime. No more tracking citizens who do no more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. That’s not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.
As President, he talks vaguely about how his team made an “assessment” and that these programs keep people safe, and “in the abstract” people might claim these programs are “Big Brother” but he thinks there’s a “balance” to be struck. It’s funny how different dictatorial surveillance powers look when you’re the guy in charge of them.
This isn’t a huge surprise, but the Washington Post is reporting that US federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Edward Snowden charging him with espionage under the Espionage Act, along with theft and conversion of government property — and have asked Hong Kong authorities to detain him. Just this morning, we were discussing the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, prosecuting six different whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, twice the number of all other presidential administrations combined. Now we’re up to number seven apparently. Update: The complaint has been unsealed (also embedded below).
Did Snowden break the law? Possibly — but charging him with espionage is ridiculous, just as it has been ridiculous in many of these cases. Snowden wasn’t doing this to “aid the enemy” but to alert the American public to the things that the administration itself had been publicly misleading to downright untruthful about. His actions have kicked off an important discussion and debate over surveillance society and how far it has gone today. That’s not espionage. If he was doing espionage, he would have sold those secrets off to a foreign power and lived a nice life somewhere else. To charge him with espionage is insane.
In terms of process, the Washington Post explains:
By filing a criminal complaint, prosecutors have a legal basis to make the request of the authorities in Hong Kong. Prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment, probably also under seal, and can then move to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong for trial in the United States.
Snowden, however, can fight the U.S. effort to have him extradited in the courts in Hong Kong. Any court battle is likely to reach Hong Kong’s highest court and could last many months, lawyers in the United States and Hong Kong said.
It also notes that while the US and Hong Kong have an extradition treaty, there is an exception for “political offenses.”
While this certainly was not unexpected, it’s still a disappointing move from the administration. The crackdown on whistleblowers does not make the US look strong. It makes our government look weak, petty and vindictive in the face of actual transparency. It’s shameful.
Facing continued criticism over the NSA surveillance scandal, President Obama went on Charlie Rose’s interview show for a “friendly” conversation in which Rose failed to really ask any serious followups on a whole variety of questions.
The interview starts out talking about a few other subjects, and then first mentions the NSA stuff as it relates to Chinese online attacks.
CHARLIE ROSE: Speaking of pushing back, what happened when you pushed back
on the question of hacking and serious allegations that come from this
country that believe that the Chinese are making serious strides and
hacking not only private sector but public sector?
BARACK OBAMA: We had a very blunt conversation about cyber security.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do they acknowledge it?
BARACK OBAMA: You know, when you’re having a conversation like this I
don’t think you ever expect a Chinese leader to say “You know what? You’re
right. You caught us red-handed.”
CHARLIE ROSE: You got me. Yes.
BARACK OBAMA: We’re just stealing all your stuff and every day we try to
figure out how we can get into Apple —
This exchange is pretty silly, given that it now seems clear that the US is perhaps just as, if not more, aggressive in its proactive hacking programs against other countries. As for “getting into Apple,” considering how much of Apple’s actual manufacturing is done in China, it’s not clear they really need to hack into the company, or that they would get much benefit from doing so. The two talk a bit more about that, and Obama reiterates the whole “China wants Apple’s secrets” bits, insisting that’s entirely unrelated to NSA stuff (even though it’s clear that the NSA itself does similar economic espionage, raising questions about whether or not it’s really all that unrelated). There’s a bit of preamble, in which the President points out that before all of this happened he had obliquely hinted at revisiting our surveillance infrastructure before all this came out, and there’s another random aside about the TSA, before they get to the point.
BARACK OBAMA: The way I view it — my job is both to protect the American people and to
protect the American way of life which includes our privacy. And so every
program that we engage in, what I’ve said is let’s examine and make sure
that we’re making the right tradeoffs.
Now, with respect to the NSA, a government agency that has been in the
intelligence-gathering business for a very long time —
CHARLIE ROSE: Bigger and better than everybody else.
BARACK OBAMA: — bigger and better than everybody else and we should take
pride in that because they’re extraordinary professionals. They’re
dedicated to keeping the American people safe. What I can say
unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person the NSA cannot listen to
your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails.
CHARLIE ROSE: And have not?
BARACK OBAMA: And have not. They can not and have not — by law and by
rule. And unless they — and usually it wouldn’t be they, it would be the
FBI — go to a court and obtain a warrant and seek probable cause. The
same way it’s always been. The same way when we were growing up and we
were watching movies, you know, you wanted to go set up a wiretap, you’ve
got to go to a judge, show probable cause and then the judge —
CHARLIE ROSE: But have any of those been turned down? All the requests to
FISA courts, have they been turned down at all?
BARACK OBAMA: Let me finish here, Charlie, because I want to make sure —
this debate has gotten cloudy very quickly.
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly.
Way to ask those tough questions, Charlie. Yay! The NSA is “bigger and better!” Whoo!
BARACK OBAMA: So point number one: if you’re a U.S. person then NSA is not
listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your e-mails unless
it’s getting an individualized court order. That’s the existing rule.
There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden — allegedly,
since there’s a criminal investigation taking place and that caused all the
ruckus. Program number one called the 2015 program. What that does is it
gets data from the service providers — like a Verizon — in bulk. And
basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting
with your telephone number. There are no names, there’s no content in that
database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how
long they took place. So that database is sitting there.
Now, if the NSA through some other sources — maybe through the FBI, maybe
through a tip that went to the CIA, maybe through the NYPD — gets a number
that — where there’s a reasonable, articulable suspicion that this might
involve foreign terrorist activity related to al Qaeda and some other
international terrorist actors — then what the NSA can do is it can query
that database to see does this number pop up. Did they make any other
calls? And if they did those calls will be spit out, a report will be
produced, it will be turned over to the FBI. At in no point is any content
revealed because there’s no content in the database.
CHARLIE ROSE: So I hear you saying I have no problem with what NSA has
been doing.
BARACK OBAMA: Well, let me finish, because I don’t. So what happens is
then the FBI — if, in fact it now wants to get content, if, in fact, it
wants to start tapping that phone — it’s got to go to the FISA court with
probable cause and ask for a warrant.
CHARLIE ROSE: But has FISA court turned down any request?
BARACK OBAMA: Because — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are
surprisingly small, number one. Number two — folks don’t go with a query
unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.
None of that actually explains why this program is necessary. If there’s a phone number that the NSA or the FBI gets that is of interest, then they should be able to get a warrant or a court order and request information on that number from the telcos. None of that means they should be able to hoover up everything.
Then we get to the “transparency” question.
CHARLIE ROSE: Should this be transparent in some way?
BARACK OBAMA: It is transparent, that’s why we set up the FISA court. The
whole point of my concern before I was president — because some people say
well, Obama was this raving liberal before, now he’s Dick Cheney. Dick
Cheney sometimes says, “Yes, you know, he took it all, lock stock and
barrel.” My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence
gathering to prevent terrorism but rather are we setting up a system of
checks and balances?
Checks and balances are not transparency. A secret court with a secret interpretation of the law for a secretive intelligence agency is not transparency.
So, on this telephone program you have a federal court with independent
federal judges overseeing the entire program and you’ve got Congress
overseeing the program. Not just the intelligence committee, not just the
judiciary committee but all of Congress had available to it before the last
reauthorization exactly how this program works.
And yet, many in Congress who were familiar with it, tried to speak out against it and were told by others that what they were saying wasn’t true, and now many in Congress claimed they were unaware of the extent of the surveillance. Yes, some of the onus is on a failed Congress that deliberately chose to remain ignorant, but to argue that this is somehow either transparent or “oversight” is a complete and utter joke. So you’d assume that Charlie Rose, distinguished journalist, would point some of that out. But he doesn’t. The President continues.
Now one last point I want to make because what you’ll hear is people say
“OK, we have no evidence that it has been abused so far,” and they say
“Let’s even grant that Obama’s not abusing it. There are all these
processes, DOJ is examining it, it’s being audited, it’s being renewed
periodically, et cetera.
The very fact that there’s all this data in bulk it has enormous potential
for abuse because they’ll say, you know, “when you start look at metadata
even if you don’t know the names you can match it up. If there’s a call to
an oncologist and if there’s a call to a lawyer and you can pair that up
and figure out maybe this person is dying and they’re writing their will
and you can yield this information.”
All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government under the
program right now to do that it would be illegal. We would not be allowed
to do that.
There are two issues here: first, the potential for abuse is very very real. Both the NSA and the FBI have a long history of being caught abusing surveillance capabilities. In just the past few years alone, the FBI has been shown regularly to have violated rules on surveillance with things like national security letters. So just saying “but that would be illegal” isn’t particularly comforting.
The second, larger point, skipped over entirely by the President (and Rose) is whether or not this should be legal in the first place. The fact is that we have a secretive FISA court coming out with a secret interpretation of the law that very few people have seen. Ssome of those who have seen the interpretation say it contradicts the plain wording of the law that everyone sees. You can’t just say “this is legal” and be done with it. There are significant questions about whether or not this interpretation really is legal — and there’s been no way to test it, because the secretive nature of the whole thing meant that no one could prove they had standing to challenge it, and then the government would try to get out of any lawsuit by claiming “national security” as an excuse.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what are you going to change? Are going to issue any
kind of instructions to the director of National Intelligence, Mr. Clapper,
and say “I want you to change it at least in this way”?
BARACK OBAMA: Here’s what we need to do. But before I say that — and I
know that we’re running out of time but I want to make sure I get very
clear on this because there’s been a lot of misinformation out there.
There’s a second program called the 702 program. And what that does is
that does not apply to any U.S. person, has to be a foreign entity, it can
only be narrowly related to counterterrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber
hacking or attacks and a select number of identifiers, phone numbers, e-
mails, et cetera, those and the process has all been approved by the
courts, you can send to providers the Yahoos or the Googles and what have
you. And in the same way that you present essentially a warrant and what
will happen then is you there can obtain content but again that does not
apply to U.S. persons and it’s only in these very narrow bands.
So, you asked, what should we do?
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
BARACK OBAMA: What I’ve said is that what is a legitimate concern,
legitimate critique is that because these are classified programs, even
though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is
overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it, despite all that the
public may not fully know and that can make the public kind of nervous
right. Because they say, “Well, Obama says it’s OK or Congress says it’s
OK. I don’t know who this judge is, I’m nervous about it.”
What I’ve asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we
can declassify without further compromising the program, number one. And
they’re in that process of doing so now. So that everything that I’m
describing to you today — people, the public, newspapers, et cetera, can
look at because frankly people are making judgments just based on these
slides that have been leaked they’re not getting the complete story.
Number two, I’ve stood up a privacy and civil liberties oversight board
made up of independent citizens, including some fierce civil libertarians.
I’ll be meeting with them and what I want to do is to set up and structure
a national conversation not only about these two programs but also about
the general problem of these big data sets because this is not going to be
restricted to government entities.
So, in summary, he’s asking the very people who have been keeping all this stuff secret all along, and claiming that any leak at all will kill Americans, to suddenly declassify some of it? Yeah, that’ll work.
There’s a little bit more after that about how the President “feels” to be compared to Bush/Cheney and a few other things, but nothing much of substance. None of it seems particularly reassuring other than “trust us, we’re not as bad as you think we are” without ever acknowledging how frequently the government has abused those privileges in the past, and without recognizing that technology has enabled them to do significantly more surveillance today than ever before.
