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Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

292 points by sehugg 13y ago

bsullivan01 13y ago
I don't blame the NSA for this, their rationale is "lets collect as much as possible and then see, gathering intel is in our mission...". After all it's all legal as far as they are concerned. I don't even blame the Exec branch that much since they have a LE mentality of "if you have nothing to hide...protect lives...blah blah" I do however blame the courts, they could've stopped or at least not-rubber stamped this. The judges also have lifetime appointments, yet they let this happen. And no, the Congress cannot order the courts to ignore the Bill of Rights, regardless of what any legislation says.
- mythz 13y ago
  The NSA and the US Govt is unequivocally to blame. It's not legal as far as they're concerned, they wouldn't be pushing for legislation to give them more power, seek secret courts for unethical interpretations of the constitution or lie and try and hide the scope of their activities (where even members of Congress still have no idea what they're doing) if that was the case. As far as they're concerned they've got all the power and freedom with the influence to push any legislature they need to, and continue unfettered in their mission to track anyone they want to regardless of the constitution, legislation or public opinion.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  I blame them all, but even more so, I blame the people. Snowden isn't the first whistleblower to emerge; google William Binney, Mark Klein, and Thomas Drake. This knowledge has been within earshot of the public for nearly a decade now, yet people just don't seem to care enough to do anything about it. There seems to be some kind of implicit collective trust in the government, that whatever they're up to is for our own good. I don't think it's ignorance; I think that people generally have known that the government was spying on them for years, they just never really cared, and now that we have full-blown, concrete evidence that it's been happening, the majority still doesn't care. It's strange.
  - orblivion 13y ago
    I think it comes down to rational ignorance. The whole thing is a negative feedback loop, nothing about it should be surprising. Breaking out of it is an uphill battle. Blame everybody, the NSA, the executive, the courts, and the population.
    - notdrunkatall 13y ago
      Should we also blame ourselves? As the informed, as the people with the capability to explain these technical issues to the masses, with the capability to foment a movement if we so desired, what blame should we place on our own shoulders, if any?
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Even if you 'foment a movement', will it simply end up like the teetotaller movement which managed to foist Prohibition on a public that didn't want it? The American people have for a long time been extremely 'tough on crime' (e.g. the ongoing 'war on drugs'), and the reason people don't seem to care is that this is an extension of the same philosophy.
  - city41 13y ago
    > yet people just don't seem to care enough to do anything about it What can we do about it? I honestly can't think of a single thing I could do, or 100,000 citizens could do that would make a lick of difference.
    - Joeri 13y ago
      There are always ways to act, you just have to be willing to do them. For example, if 100.000 people constantly barraged the members of congress to outlaw this it would happen, but people aren't sufficiently motivated to turn this into a genuine cause. I agree with the parent comment, people have too much trust that this all will not affect their lives. The fact that a functioning democracy becomes impossible when political opponents can be retroactively wiretapped for years into the past is something esoteric that simply doesn't strike home.
triplesec 13y ago
particularly galling pull-out para: "Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later." The Cheney administration was openly deceitful, as it were, a brazen set of liars fronted by an idiot stooge. This turn of events - particularly given Obama's rhetoric and the expectations of him - seems in many ways much more insidiously dangerous.
- protomyth 13y ago
  It's pretty hard to take your point seriously when your second paragraph is so clearly wrong and more a SNL sketch than reality. No President in the modern era has been stupid. The psychotic need to perpetuate this is one of the ideas making politics in the USA worse than it should be. The evidence and interviews with the former President show him to be very intelligent.
  - milesf 13y ago
    So what if he's smart? As if smart has anything to do with being honest and moral. Give me honesty and integrity over IQ points any day.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      I am pointing out what was written which was utter BS. As to his honesty or morality, history will have some interesting comparisons versus his predecessor and successor.
      - forkandwait 13y ago
        Oh -- I do believe he had a better marriage than Bill Clinton. Who cares? He was still a laughable fuckup as president.
segacontroller 13y ago
Why is this not perjury? Kinda serious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ea3dBJAuI&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ea3dBJAuI&feature=youtube_... >Perjury, also known as forswearing, is the willful act of swearing a false oath or of falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official proceeding.
- kylec 13y ago
  Was he under oath to tell the truth at that press conference? If not, it's not perjury, just ordinary lying.
  - charonn0 13y ago
    > If not, it's not perjury, just ordinary lying. Even so, such a lie when delivered by PotUS might constitute a high crime and/or misdemeanor.
- thezilch 13y ago
  Is he under oath? Does it rely on interpretation or perception of the facts? I'd love for everyone one last of these crooks to lose every lifeline left in their lives, left to flip burgers and to live on the spoils of their own work, but if they've gotten away with this much, WHAT court is going to find them punishable? I really can't imagine anyone involved having a tougher life after being found taking our country for advantage, like has been done, and that is extremely and deeply crushing.
graycat 13y ago
My reading of Obama is that he is nearly terrified about being blamed for anything. If the OP is correct, then this is some blame that might stick to Obama. In this case, my reading is that he will rush to correct the situation. So, first step, pin the blame on Obama, and then let him suffer with it until he changes it.
- prawn 13y ago
  May be more terrified of the next 9/11 and criticism that he didn't do enough to stop it. (I'm not condoning their decisions.)
  - graycat 13y ago
    Yes, of course, but now for Obama that possibility of blame for not stopping another terrorist attack can seem less important than the actual blame, now, for the NSA spying on US citizens, that is, will so seem to Obama if enough people raise heck over the NSA spying. If I were the POTUS, then I'd have my staff draft a short statement and use it to address the nation. The main point would be that the US actually is vulnerable to an attack by terrorists, and even if we totally lock down our country, turn the US into a 'surveillance' state and a police state, trash most of the Bill of Rights, damage our domestic economy, shoot our international trade in the gut, etc., we will still be vulnerable. We can't be 100% safe. I'd mention that often there are several courses of action, with some safer than others but none 100% safe. E.g., from B. Schneier, after 9/11 so many people were so afraid of commercial air travel and drove cars instead that the fact that cars are much less safe than air travel resulted in more deaths of US citizens than 9/11 caused. Might also mention that a goal of UBL was not to defeat the US via force but just to trick the US into a response so absurd and wasteful that the US would bankrupt itself, and here UBL has had a lot of success. Then I'd ask the US citizens to go to a special, nationwide referendum on what to do, (1) return to the US as it was before 9/11 with some prudent and legal improvements to stop terrorists or (2) trash much of what is great about the US and still be vulnerable to terrorists. In this choice, we have to notice that the terrorists are not totally stupid and will avoid confronting the defenses we do put up and, instead, exploit ways in which we are still vulnerable. A review of the track record of just what good all our anti-terrorism hysteria -- NSA, 'militarization' of local police, trashing the Bill of Rights, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, the TSA trashing our domestic transportation industry, excesses by our Customs units, the money, etc. -- actually accomplished. E.g., we should note the Boston bomber -- the NSA, etc. didn't stop him. Then let the US citizens decide. Good way for Obama to play CYA and also get the US back to a sane country away from some national neurotic hysteria from a few wackos with airline tickets and box cutters.
frank_boyd 13y ago
> “The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim And again, the foreigners' right to protection of their privacy is not even up for discussion. I'm tempted to say this is un-american. But thinking it over, it seems to actually have become the new "american". In any case, this kind of attitude can not come from nation that sees itself as "the best country in the world".
- Sagat 13y ago
  Americans believe their country has been chosen by God: ordained by divine powers to be the leader of the world. So it's not surprising that they view the rights of foreigners with contempt or at the very least lack of interest. "Un-american" supposedly means against freedom (and a range of other positive buzzwords) which is pretty hilarious given their behavior.
  - toyg 13y ago
    Some Americans. I do believe some actually know they've just been lucky enough to get a fairly resilient constitutional framework designed in an era of Enlightenment, and then smart enough to be on the right side of history during the three major conflicts that shaped the last century.
    - JshWright 13y ago
      Don't overlook geography. The fact that we have easy access to both major world oceans is also a _huge_ part of why we have been successful as a nation. It greatly simplifies both international trade and naval power projection. We would have been on the winning side of those conflicts no matter which side we chose.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Indeed, even Sen. Wyden says as much: “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.” However such behavior is at least consistent with traditional American 'protections' on foreign traffic. Even before there was an NSA, there was a government office reading Western Union telegrams being transmitted internationally. This behavior is even consistent with the behavior of even Germany, which has a similar concept of foreign surveillance vs. domestic.
chmike 13y ago
Could this be explained by a secret deal to support health care prgram in exchange of supportIng a security enforcement program ?
wyclif 13y ago
Obama's presidency has been disastrous for the privacy of American citizens: “The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.” The Obama admin hypocrisy on transparency is astounding. No public debate, no checks by Congress on the authority to wiretap and collect enormous amounts of data on US citizens. Yet the people who voted for him are still making excuses for this admin.
- devx 13y ago
  Impeach him. I'm sorry if you voted for him and you think it's a too "radical" move, but I really think it's actually a very "proportional" and reasonable move at this point. More think he should be impeached if he goes to war with Syria despite a No vote from Congress and despite UN saying no, and breaking international law. I think the NSA thing is at least as big as that, and if he does both then it's that much clearer that he's acting as a dictator with unlimited powers that needs to be overthrown. He has no regard for the Constitution, no regard for human rights, no regard for due process, and no regard for international law. Not doing it would just send a message to other psychopaths running for president the next time, that it's okay to blatantly lie to the electorate, and then do stuff at least as bad as he did. Impeach him.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I would agree. However I think it is more important to impeach those in charge of the intelligence community first and then work up to the President. I am not sure the President is in the loop here. As far as I can tell he gets most of his info in these areas from the same sources that we do.
    - charonn0 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mpyne 13y ago
“If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.” Although I'm receptive to that argument in general, part of the whole idea that generic collection is authorized at all, is that pre-emptively mirroring the data without looking at it (assuming that such mirroring is required at all) is still at least not doing a search on that data. While I understand the Administration has tried to go away from that argument after it was first presented I see no other justification for capturing traffic that isn't clearly crossing national boundaries (which is admittedly a hard problem). So the only way I could see for that argument to apply is if the data in question comes up on a legal search of foreign traffic, but not a new selector search into the entire pool of set aside traffic. If you couldn't have legally run a search on the data as it came across the wire due to lack of a warrant then it wouldn't become OK unless another legal search window into that data opened it. It certainly doesn't become OK just because you happen to have custody of the data, just like we don't let the government open and read our mail without a warrant.

292 points by sehugg 13y ago

I don't blame the NSA for this, their rationale is "lets collect as much as possible and then see, gathering intel is in our mission...". After all it's all legal as far as they are concerned. I don't even blame the Exec branch that much since they have a LE mentality of "if you have nothing to hide...protect lives...blah blah" I do however blame the courts, they could've stopped or at least not-rubber stamped this. The judges also have lifetime appointments, yet they let this happen. And no, the Congress cannot order the courts to ignore the Bill of Rights, regardless of what any legislation says.

mythz 13y ago
The NSA and the US Govt is unequivocally to blame. It's not legal as far as they're concerned, they wouldn't be pushing for legislation to give them more power, seek secret courts for unethical interpretations of the constitution or lie and try and hide the scope of their activities (where even members of Congress still have no idea what they're doing) if that was the case. As far as they're concerned they've got all the power and freedom with the influence to push any legislature they need to, and continue unfettered in their mission to track anyone they want to regardless of the constitution, legislation or public opinion.
notdrunkatall 13y ago
I blame them all, but even more so, I blame the people. Snowden isn't the first whistleblower to emerge; google William Binney, Mark Klein, and Thomas Drake. This knowledge has been within earshot of the public for nearly a decade now, yet people just don't seem to care enough to do anything about it. There seems to be some kind of implicit collective trust in the government, that whatever they're up to is for our own good. I don't think it's ignorance; I think that people generally have known that the government was spying on them for years, they just never really cared, and now that we have full-blown, concrete evidence that it's been happening, the majority still doesn't care. It's strange.
- orblivion 13y ago
  I think it comes down to rational ignorance. The whole thing is a negative feedback loop, nothing about it should be surprising. Breaking out of it is an uphill battle. Blame everybody, the NSA, the executive, the courts, and the population.
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    Should we also blame ourselves? As the informed, as the people with the capability to explain these technical issues to the masses, with the capability to foment a movement if we so desired, what blame should we place on our own shoulders, if any?
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Even if you 'foment a movement', will it simply end up like the teetotaller movement which managed to foist Prohibition on a public that didn't want it? The American people have for a long time been extremely 'tough on crime' (e.g. the ongoing 'war on drugs'), and the reason people don't seem to care is that this is an extension of the same philosophy.
- city41 13y ago
  > yet people just don't seem to care enough to do anything about it What can we do about it? I honestly can't think of a single thing I could do, or 100,000 citizens could do that would make a lick of difference.
  - Joeri 13y ago
    There are always ways to act, you just have to be willing to do them. For example, if 100.000 people constantly barraged the members of congress to outlaw this it would happen, but people aren't sufficiently motivated to turn this into a genuine cause. I agree with the parent comment, people have too much trust that this all will not affect their lives. The fact that a functioning democracy becomes impossible when political opponents can be retroactively wiretapped for years into the past is something esoteric that simply doesn't strike home.

triplesec 13y ago

particularly galling pull-out para: "Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later." The Cheney administration was openly deceitful, as it were, a brazen set of liars fronted by an idiot stooge. This turn of events - particularly given Obama's rhetoric and the expectations of him - seems in many ways much more insidiously dangerous.

protomyth 13y ago
It's pretty hard to take your point seriously when your second paragraph is so clearly wrong and more a SNL sketch than reality. No President in the modern era has been stupid. The psychotic need to perpetuate this is one of the ideas making politics in the USA worse than it should be. The evidence and interviews with the former President show him to be very intelligent.
- milesf 13y ago
  So what if he's smart? As if smart has anything to do with being honest and moral. Give me honesty and integrity over IQ points any day.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    I am pointing out what was written which was utter BS. As to his honesty or morality, history will have some interesting comparisons versus his predecessor and successor.
    - forkandwait 13y ago
      Oh -- I do believe he had a better marriage than Bill Clinton. Who cares? He was still a laughable fuckup as president.

segacontroller 13y ago

Why is this not perjury? Kinda serious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ea3dBJAuI&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ea3dBJAuI&feature=youtube_... >Perjury, also known as forswearing, is the willful act of swearing a false oath or of falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official proceeding.

kylec 13y ago
Was he under oath to tell the truth at that press conference? If not, it's not perjury, just ordinary lying.
- charonn0 13y ago
  > If not, it's not perjury, just ordinary lying. Even so, such a lie when delivered by PotUS might constitute a high crime and/or misdemeanor.
thezilch 13y ago
Is he under oath? Does it rely on interpretation or perception of the facts? I'd love for everyone one last of these crooks to lose every lifeline left in their lives, left to flip burgers and to live on the spoils of their own work, but if they've gotten away with this much, WHAT court is going to find them punishable? I really can't imagine anyone involved having a tougher life after being found taking our country for advantage, like has been done, and that is extremely and deeply crushing.

graycat 13y ago

My reading of Obama is that he is nearly terrified about being blamed for anything. If the OP is correct, then this is some blame that might stick to Obama. In this case, my reading is that he will rush to correct the situation. So, first step, pin the blame on Obama, and then let him suffer with it until he changes it.

prawn 13y ago
May be more terrified of the next 9/11 and criticism that he didn't do enough to stop it. (I'm not condoning their decisions.)
- graycat 13y ago
  Yes, of course, but now for Obama that possibility of blame for not stopping another terrorist attack can seem less important than the actual blame, now, for the NSA spying on US citizens, that is, will so seem to Obama if enough people raise heck over the NSA spying. If I were the POTUS, then I'd have my staff draft a short statement and use it to address the nation. The main point would be that the US actually is vulnerable to an attack by terrorists, and even if we totally lock down our country, turn the US into a 'surveillance' state and a police state, trash most of the Bill of Rights, damage our domestic economy, shoot our international trade in the gut, etc., we will still be vulnerable. We can't be 100% safe. I'd mention that often there are several courses of action, with some safer than others but none 100% safe. E.g., from B. Schneier, after 9/11 so many people were so afraid of commercial air travel and drove cars instead that the fact that cars are much less safe than air travel resulted in more deaths of US citizens than 9/11 caused. Might also mention that a goal of UBL was not to defeat the US via force but just to trick the US into a response so absurd and wasteful that the US would bankrupt itself, and here UBL has had a lot of success. Then I'd ask the US citizens to go to a special, nationwide referendum on what to do, (1) return to the US as it was before 9/11 with some prudent and legal improvements to stop terrorists or (2) trash much of what is great about the US and still be vulnerable to terrorists. In this choice, we have to notice that the terrorists are not totally stupid and will avoid confronting the defenses we do put up and, instead, exploit ways in which we are still vulnerable. A review of the track record of just what good all our anti-terrorism hysteria -- NSA, 'militarization' of local police, trashing the Bill of Rights, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, the TSA trashing our domestic transportation industry, excesses by our Customs units, the money, etc. -- actually accomplished. E.g., we should note the Boston bomber -- the NSA, etc. didn't stop him. Then let the US citizens decide. Good way for Obama to play CYA and also get the US back to a sane country away from some national neurotic hysteria from a few wackos with airline tickets and box cutters.

frank_boyd 13y ago

> “The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim And again, the foreigners' right to protection of their privacy is not even up for discussion. I'm tempted to say this is un-american. But thinking it over, it seems to actually have become the new "american". In any case, this kind of attitude can not come from nation that sees itself as "the best country in the world".

Sagat 13y ago
Americans believe their country has been chosen by God: ordained by divine powers to be the leader of the world. So it's not surprising that they view the rights of foreigners with contempt or at the very least lack of interest. "Un-american" supposedly means against freedom (and a range of other positive buzzwords) which is pretty hilarious given their behavior.
- toyg 13y ago
  Some Americans. I do believe some actually know they've just been lucky enough to get a fairly resilient constitutional framework designed in an era of Enlightenment, and then smart enough to be on the right side of history during the three major conflicts that shaped the last century.
  - JshWright 13y ago
    Don't overlook geography. The fact that we have easy access to both major world oceans is also a _huge_ part of why we have been successful as a nation. It greatly simplifies both international trade and naval power projection. We would have been on the winning side of those conflicts no matter which side we chose.
mpyne 13y ago
Indeed, even Sen. Wyden says as much: “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.” However such behavior is at least consistent with traditional American 'protections' on foreign traffic. Even before there was an NSA, there was a government office reading Western Union telegrams being transmitted internationally. This behavior is even consistent with the behavior of even Germany, which has a similar concept of foreign surveillance vs. domestic.

chmike 13y ago

Could this be explained by a secret deal to support health care prgram in exchange of supportIng a security enforcement program ?

wyclif 13y ago

Obama's presidency has been disastrous for the privacy of American citizens: “The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.” The Obama admin hypocrisy on transparency is astounding. No public debate, no checks by Congress on the authority to wiretap and collect enormous amounts of data on US citizens. Yet the people who voted for him are still making excuses for this admin.

devx 13y ago
Impeach him. I'm sorry if you voted for him and you think it's a too "radical" move, but I really think it's actually a very "proportional" and reasonable move at this point. More think he should be impeached if he goes to war with Syria despite a No vote from Congress and despite UN saying no, and breaking international law. I think the NSA thing is at least as big as that, and if he does both then it's that much clearer that he's acting as a dictator with unlimited powers that needs to be overthrown. He has no regard for the Constitution, no regard for human rights, no regard for due process, and no regard for international law. Not doing it would just send a message to other psychopaths running for president the next time, that it's okay to blatantly lie to the electorate, and then do stuff at least as bad as he did. Impeach him.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I would agree. However I think it is more important to impeach those in charge of the intelligence community first and then work up to the President. I am not sure the President is in the loop here. As far as I can tell he gets most of his info in these areas from the same sources that we do.
  - charonn0 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mpyne 13y ago

“If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.” Although I'm receptive to that argument in general, part of the whole idea that generic collection is authorized at all, is that pre-emptively mirroring the data without looking at it (assuming that such mirroring is required at all) is still at least not doing a search on that data. While I understand the Administration has tried to go away from that argument after it was first presented I see no other justification for capturing traffic that isn't clearly crossing national boundaries (which is admittedly a hard problem). So the only way I could see for that argument to apply is if the data in question comes up on a legal search of foreign traffic, but not a new selector search into the entire pool of set aside traffic. If you couldn't have legally run a search on the data as it came across the wire due to lack of a warrant then it wouldn't become OK unless another legal search window into that data opened it. It certainly doesn't become OK just because you happen to have custody of the data, just like we don't let the government open and read our mail without a warrant.