Obama on the NSA: Business As Usual

Yesterday, Obama held a press conference on the NSA trying to assuage the anger in the US on NSA's wholesale snooping on US ctizens. His response -- as has been widely pointed out addressed on trying to soothe the American people while continuing NSA's activities. For the rest of the wor5ld, there was not even an attempt to address their concerns. We reproduce two pieces from techdirt.com on Obama's press conference.

The stories on the shutdown of two email providers are very important. It shows the true nature of nature of the US government. It reminds us of the hypocrisy and spinelessness of the large US tech firms. If only the Internet biggies -- Google/ Facebook/others could take this position, things might be different in the US.

Obama's Response To NSA Was To Appease The Public, Not Reduce The Spying

from the total-failure dept

We've spent much of the afternoon detailing some of President Obama's statements concerning his response to the NSA surveillance revelations, combined with some of the documents released by the administration. But a key point in all of this is highlighted in the Associated Press's coverage of the press conference: President Obama flat out admitted that this was about appeasing a public that doesn't trust the administration, not about reducing the surveillance.

President Barack Obama made it clear Friday he has no intention of stopping the daily collection of American phone records. And while he offered "appropriate reforms," he blamed government leaks for creating distrust of his domestic spying program.

In an afternoon news conference, the president acknowledged the domestic spying has troubled Americans and hurt the country's image abroad. But he called it a critical counterterrorism tool.

Even more to the point, his comments represent a fundamental misunderstanding of why the public doesn't trust the government. That's because he keeps insisting that the program isn't being abused and that all of this collection is legal. But, really, that's not what the concern is about. Even though we actually know that the NSA has a history of abuse (and other parts of the intelligence community before that), a major concern is that scooping up so much data is considered legal in the first place. So, when President Obama says that we should blindly trust the government not to abuse the data, that's missing the point:

"Understandably, people would be concerned," the president said. "I would be, too, if I weren't inside the government."

That's not particularly comforting.

Don't Insult Our Intelligence, Mr. President: This Debate Wouldn't Be Happening Without Ed Snowden

from the the-big-joke dept

One of the more ridiculous claim's during President Obama's press conference on NSA surveillance today was the claim that he had already started this process prior to the Ed Snowden leaks and that it's likely we would end up in the same place. While he admitted that Snowden may have "accelerated" the process, he's also claiming that the leaks put our national security at risk. There is, of course, little to support any of this. Tim Lee has the best response to this so far, noting that it's clearly bogus that this debate would have happened without Snowden:

... the Obama administration showed little interest in subjecting the NSA to meaningful oversight and public debate prior to Snowden’s actions. When Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked for a “ballpark figure” of the number of Americans whose information was being collected by the NSA last year, the agency refused to give the senator any information, arguing that doing so would violate the privacy of those whose information was collected.

In March, at a Congressional hearing, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper answered “no sir” when Wyden asked whether the NSA had collected “any type of data at all on millions of Americans.” We now know his statement was incorrect.

Wyden and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) had also been pressing for almost four years for access to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s legal opinions interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Until Snowden’s disclosures, the senators made no headway. Now, the Obama administration has announced it intends to release its legal interpretation of Section 215.

As Lee's colleague Ezra Klein points out in response, the fact that Obama is still attacking Snowden is simply ridiculous.

“What makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation,” Obama said. “It’s the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process.”

If that’s so, then Edward Snowden should be hailed as a hero. There’s simply no doubt that his leaks led to more open debate and more democratic process than would’ve existed otherwise.

Or, in the shortest possible form, NY Times' reporter Binyamin Appelbaum summed it up thusly:

Obama is really mad at Edward Snowden for forcing us patriots to have this critically important conversation.

This is an important discussion, but President Obama has had five years to have it, and has actively resisted it at multiple key opportunities to do so. To pretend that any of this would have happened without Snowden is ridiculous. At the same time, to insist that people who care about our civil liberties are patriots, while still trying to attack and demonize Snowden, just screams of insincerity on the issue. Snowden should be proud: he did this to start the debate and to create change, and it appears that's happening. But President Obama should be ashamed to pretend that this would have happened without Snowden. It's insulting the intelligence of the American public.