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Obama said the NSA wasn’t “actually abusing” its powers. He was wrong
- teawithcarl 13y agoThe chief judge of the FISA Court says "ability of the FISA Courts to police spying is limited". http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/court-ability-to-police-us-spying-program-limited/2013/08/15/4a8c8c44-05cd-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/court-ability-to-poli... PHOTOS of the 12 FISA Court judges. 11 of the 12 were appointed to bench by Bush or Reagan. Only one man appoints judges to the FISA Court - Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/meet-the-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-court/2013/06/24/9c037ee6-dd16-11e2-9218-bc2ac7cd44e2_gallery.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/meet-the-foreign-inte...
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoIt's about time one of them spoke up.
- shirederby 13y agoWas he "wrong" or was he lying? It's possible that he was misinformed by his advisers and indeed did not actually know. But I am not optimistic about that notion.
- rhizome 13y agoLet's go back 50 years: Plausible Deniability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
- ck2 13y agoI have a better question about that. Was he just wrong because he just didn't know? Or was it much worse in that he knew and was outright lying? Because I would honestly like to really know.
- j_baker 13y agoYou know, I would have to imagine that if Obama were in full possession of all the facts, he would have known that Snowden had those slides and kept his mouth shut. Obama's just too smart to make a blunder like this.
- bad_user 13y agoTalking about things you don't know to be true is still a lie in my book. The correct way of dealing with this would have been for him to say - we don't know but we have launched a full scale investigation. He failed to do so, while still protecting the NSA in the face of all accusations and proof to the contrary. Does it really matter if he knew or not? We'll never know how much Obama is involved in all of this, but another possibility would be that the masses simply don't care much about facts and believe the words spoken by what seems to be a competent authority in the matter, especially one they voted for. Ask regular people what they think about this whole deal, you'll have a revelation. This is damage control, plain and simple.
- steve19 13y agoI think that attitude is very naive. Obamas actions in the near future will reveal all. If he was lied to and deceived, he will apologize publicly and he will reign down vengeance on those who lied to him (unless he is completely spineless and incompetent, which I don't believe he is). On the other hand, if he knew all along these revelations will simply be played down and it will be business as usual in Washington, DC (although the NSA will probably not make the "mistake" of tapping Washington DC calls instead of Egypt again).
- DannyBee 13y agoI think your viewpoint is very naive. He will choose the first option whether or not he was actually lied to, if he believes it is his best move.
- j_baker 13y agoAll I'm saying is that Obama is provably not in command of all the facts needed to prevent a blunder like this. Whether that means he had no idea about the scope of abuse or whether he was simply unaware that anyone would prove his lies wrong is yet to be determined.
- nu2ycombinator 13y agoHey.. Please understand the Obama's position too. You never know what secrets of Obama NSA has. :)
- junto 13y agoIt might well explain the flip-flop. All of those privacy bills and NSA constraint bills he pushed, voted for and in some cases put forward, appear to be a complete reversal to his position now. Why?
- codex 13y agoWrong. This isn't abuse. The audit found only unintentional spying--in other words, mistakes. No organization is perfect; bugs do exist, especially in software. It's pretty amazing to see the detail at which these incidents were logged, however.
- j_baker 13y agoAccording to Google, abuse means the improper use of something. Regardless of whether it was accidental or intentional, abuse is abuse.
- codex 13y agoOh, come now. The definition of the verb is "use (something) to bad effect or for a bad purpose; misuse". That implies willfulness. Accidents and bugs are not abuse; were they, we wouldn't have separate words for them. Or, put another way: I hear you inadvertently spilled water on your wife at the dinner table last night; tell me, for how long have you been abusing her?
- samweinberg 13y agoThat's a bad analogy. Spilling water on your wife and domestic violence are very different things. Both the inadvertent (and arguably unconstitutional) collection of Americans' data by the NSA and the willful abuse of power by the NSA are pretty horrendous acts, whichever you choose to believe happened.
- j_baker 13y agoYou talk about the verb when we're talking about the noun. I call cherry-picking. And yet the point still stands. You can accidentally misuse something. How many people have accidentally misused C pointers?
- rhizome 13y agoSo, 2nd degree civil rights violations. Also: ignorance of the law is no excuse.
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- jonnybgood 13y agoObama may not be wrong at all if these are unintentional violations. However, Obama may well be wrong if they were intentional actions in accordance with NSA standard of operating procedure (SOP). So, the NSA isn't actually abusing its powers, just as Obama stated. Just an awful NSA employee who is not following the SOP. I think that's an important distinction and perhaps the point Obama was making.
- dmix 13y ago> Now part of the reason they’re not abused is because they’re — these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC Greenwald has been writing about the total ineffectiveness of judicial checks on state power for over a decade, primarily since Bush vastly increased executive branch reach and began using the state secrets privilege as a protective shield, crippling the ability for courts to properly prevent abuses. See "Elimination of judicial check on executive power" on Wikipedia, citing an article from 7 years ago (2006): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#Elimination_of_judicial_check_on_executive_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#Elimin... It seems people are just beginning to pay attention to what Greenwald has been warning us about for a long time.
- DHowett 13y agoI would argue that a world wherein the NSA is not abusing its power is a world wherein that power was already granted them.
- jaekwon 13y agoThis strategy of slow trickling information is working out pretty well. Good job, team.
- onoj 13y agoAm I misunderstanding something here - surely the information Snowden revealed is that the NSA is dumping EVERY electronic communication in a huge data dump all the time. Then they are saying "sometimes" they search for the wrong things in that archive? Isn't the issue that they are archiving everything we do in the first place?
- vidarh 13y agoYes, but this specific article is simply a matter of hanging someone with the rope they were given: Obama claimed abuses wasn't happening; NSA's own records shows they are. While on one hand it's a bit of a side show to argue about this, it's also far more likely that people in general will see the problem if they see officials repeatedly being wrong or outright lying about abuses than to get them to accept there's an issue with "just" collecting the data. The "just" collecting the data part of the problem is rarely seen as an issue with those who largely trust the government, as it is hard to get them to understand that even if the current government is ok, things can go rapidly downhill as they tend to write off any examples as too extreme or "can't happen here". The best way of reigning this in, is unfortunately to focus on any too close for comfort abuses. E.g. if one found NSA staff stalking ex'es would likely get a far more furious response than NSA staff collecting data about large swathes of the population.
- northwest 13y agoWas he "wrong" or was he lying? I'd say that's secondary, in some way. The first thing that matters is the result. And it continues a) to be unacceptable, and b) to not be addressed
- acqq 13y agoSenator Ron Wyden on NSA Surveillance and Government Transparency: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/q-a-senator-ron-wyden-on-nsa-surveillance-and-government-transparency-20130815 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/q-a-senator-ron-wy... When Congress wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, I suppose they could have found some way to keep its details a secret, so that Soviet agents wouldn't know what the FBI and NSA's authorities were. But Congress made that law public, because it's a fundamental principle of democracy that laws should be public all the time, and every American should be able to find out what their government thinks the law means. The FISA court is arguably the most bizarre court in the United States. This is the only court I know of that is structured to hear essentially one side – it comes from the government. A group of judges operating in complete secret and issuing binding rulings based solely on the government's arguments have made possible the sweeping surveillance authorities the public only found out about [recently.] What's noteworthy is there has been nobody there to argue the other side, and that is what we want to change. This court has to be reformed to include an adversarial process where arguments for greater privacy protections can be offered alongside the government's arguments for greater surveillance powers. It should have a selection process that produces a more diverse group of judges, and a process to ensure that its important rulings are made public so that American people can understand exactly what government agencies think the laws allow them to do. It was a lack of protections like these that allowed secret law to persist for so many years.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoYes we can!
- ry0ohki 13y agoIt seems super suspicious the "202" to "20" mistake occurred for more than a single call, and it just so happens your political enemies are in the area code mistaken?
- Terretta 13y agoI think it's interesting what his incident says about scope and capability.
- sparticvs 13y agoHe said that because he wanted them to do that
- millerc 13y ago> interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review Oh please give me a break. This is the worse they could come up with, a typographical error that produced large swaths of unusable data for analysts? Seems like a normal part of any computer systems: a typo will cause unintended consequences. Sensationalist reporting and blatant exploitation of minor plot twist shouldn't make it to any serious news outlet, let alone HN. Let's keep it serious guys.
- JshWright 13y agoThe issue wasn't the fact that an innocent mistake happened; the issue is that a major breech of privacy for some large number of US citizens wasn't reported to the groups tasked with judicial and congressional oversight of the NSA. The reason it occurred is meaningless. The _fact_ that it occurred should have been reported.
- eliasmacpherson 13y agoThink you are making an assumption saying that it's unusable. I'd say it was highly usable. 202 is the North American telephone area code for Washington, D.C. Do you think you could get usable data with a 'large number' of calls placed from DC? I can't think of anywhere better really.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alan_cx 13y ago"At a news conference Friday, President Obama insisted that the threat of NSA abuses was mostly theoretical:" As are the vast majority of the "threats" we are suppose to give up our freedoms for. We live in a "what if" society.
- danenania 13y agoInteresting to see that "wrong" and "mistaken" have now become synonyms for "powerful government official lying through his teeth".
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoCome on, if this wasn't a bold-faced lie, it follows that the President is either incompetent/derelict, or not in control of the NSA; in which case the President is a dupe/stooge, and the NSA is acting of its own accord outside the defined bounds of its authority. Let's hope the President is merely lying.
- roc 13y agoOr the US Government is just like any other large organization, and when low level employees screw up, or a report looks bad, everyone at every level on the way up tries like hell to bury, burn or spin it, so that it doesn't reflect poorly on them. Which does imply a troubling level of ignorance and/or misplaced trust, but is not necessarily on par with the NSA gone rogue or the President being a dupe or stooge.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoOkay then, the NSA is incompetent/untrustworthy, and the gov't is incompetent/derelict in its oversight duty. I'm going to consider this possibility to be less likely, unless the President makes decisive corrective action. If the President can't denounce/correct such a failure, then he owns it.
- JonSkeptic 13y agoI read the title and I think, "Obama says lots of things." http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/ http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/