15 ms·
Obama Is Announcing His NSA Reforms Tomorrow - Use This Scorecard To Judge Them
- chewxy 13y agoI'm not optimistic :S
- Dirlewanger 13y agoWow. People just cannot let go of Obama. It's pathetic that people STILL are willing to forgive him, thinking he'll somehow change, that he's somehow better and will rise above this endlessly expanding government of ours and take a stand with reform. Let the fuck go of it. And sharing memes on Facebook? What the fuck is that going to do?
- RankingMember 13y agoI don't understand your frustration here, as I don't see any Obama sympathy in this posting. Was the title different previously?
- Dirlewanger 13y agoDo you not see the extremely lofty wishlist that has no chance of being fulfilled at all? Maybe halfway on one or two of them, but that's it. When are people going to realize this president is more of the same? This is going to be a damage control press conference filled to the brim with buzzwords and weasel phrases. You want real actual measurable change? Get your fucking congressman out of office.
- coldpie 13y agoI suspect that's the point. When the reforms score somewhere in the 0-2 range, as you know they will, it's another factor to use in the campaign against illegal spying.
- protomyth 13y ago> You want real actual measurable change? Get your fucking congressman out of office. My congressman is voting the exact way I like, its the rest of your congresspeople that are screwing it up. // truth and the actual situation for many in one statement
- RankingMember 13y agoSo you're saying we should grade him on a curve? I think an objective list of necessities, leaving our experience with Obama (or any previous presidents) out of it, is the only way to look at this reasonably without getting all political about it.
- throwaway5752 13y agoSo, another words, you have no realistically achievable plan either, but you're angrier and more pessimistic. How about this: if you want measurable change, start with a goal that has somewhere greater than a 0 percent chance of succeeding. It also might help if you could point to why some particular congressperson was objectionable, like if you actually had metrics for what you were trying to achieve so we would all vote in bunch of people that were worse that the status quo. Like a scorecard.
- sp332 13y agoIt seems the point of the wishlist is explicitly to demonstrate how far short the actual announcement will fall. The reason it's so "lofty" is to set Obama up to fail - even if he announces some real reforms, it's completely unrealistic to demand all this at once.
- d23 13y agoLet's just see how it turns out by the end of all of this. Remember, people said the same thing with DADT: "why not just end this? why not issue an executive order?" Because he was playing the long game and ended up getting a permanent repeal.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoThat sounds a bit like an apologist. I'm keeping my hopes very low - after so many, many disappointments I believe his brand is damaged.
- Shivetya 13y agohe wasn't playing the long game, he is playing the same game now as then, politics. All his actions are weighed against the affect on the next election. There is no other concern with him or the others in power. Promises made before elections are just phrases used to put the other side off balance or force the other side to react. They are never really meant to be acted upon if there is any political cost. Playing the long game, nah just waiting out inevitability, as in it wasn't going to stand anyway and he had that luxury to rely on
- dllthomas 13y agoThis is a list of demands, not a list of expectations.
- sp332 13y agoIt's simple: Obama's publicly-stated goals are much more optimistic than other politicians'. People identify with the optimism and the goals.
- hga 13y agoI think your analysis is a bit too simple, it depends on where you are in the political spectrum. He routinely demonizes roughly half the nation (that's my half, which is why I so acutely notice that), and plenty of those goals are anything but "optimistic" for subsets of that half. That's one reason he's such a polarizing figure. Yeah, he promised to bring us together, but to bring up one particularly relevant to Hacker News example, look at his "you didn't build that" speech. Coming from an entrepreneurial family and having working in a number of startups, I couldn't take that as anything but an attack on me and mine.
- sp332 13y agoOh there are lots of reasons to dislike Obama. Dirlewanger asked why anyone kept thinking that he's actually different from the rest of government.
- hga 13y agoWell, yeah to both points. I'm just disagreeing with your claim that in general his stated goals are "optimistic" for roughly half the nation, and that's just perception....
- mikeyouse 13y agoWhy would you take an out-of-context quote as an attack on you and yours? The actual text: There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me – because they want to give something back. They know they didn't – look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business – you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. The 'You Didn't Build That' was just an awkward change of thoughts from the 'roads and bridges' in the previous sentence. Were you equally insulted when Romney said: You Olympians, however, know you didn't get here solely on your own power. For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions. All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them. We've already cheered the Olympians, let's also cheer the parents, coaches, and communities. All right! Both were a nod to the social contract which hasn't been terribly controversial since sometime in the 1600's.
- cmiles74 13y agoI don't think we're going to here anything substantial from the President. Regardless, providing people with a list of the issues and an easy way to keep track of how we does (or more likely, doesn't) address them sounds like a good idea to me.
- ck2 13y agoWell Gitmo was ordered closed. So it's gone right? Oh yeah. Announce all you want, it will still be there tomorrow.
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 13y ago"We promise to work harder next time to not get caught"
- pwelch 13y agoI feel like a pessimist but this what it sounds like during these types of announcements.
- sleepyK 13y agoAfter making all his Nobel prize winning promises, all Obama has done is systematically break nearly every one of them. Tomorrow is just going to be one more in a long series of disappointments.
- znowi 13y agoThere were some bold announcements on spying from 2007 as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQlsS9diBs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQlsS9diBs
- JPKab 13y agoWhile I'm the first to admit that Obama is lacking in political courage (he generally just sticks his finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing, like he did with gay marriage), Gitmo isn't his fault. We can thank the cowardly Congress for that. "Rep. Dumbshit voted to close Gitmo!! Dumbshit loves the terrorists!!! This November, vote Jim Douchenozzle for Congress, because Douchenozzle hates the terrorists." The ignorance and overall un-literacy (not illiterate, unliterate, meaning they're too fucking lazy to read) of the American public, and the high turnout ratio of elderly, and I'm sorry to say, gullible senior citizens doesn't help.
- freehunter 13y ago
- cincinnatus 13y agoThe problems that led to this failure of the system are cultural not procedural. We already have the constitution and many laws and procedure that should have prevented what has been going on. What we have is a profound lack of understanding of how intelligence works and the limits of what can be done with it, intentionally or not. You can't fix culture. You can only shut it down and start over. And that will not happen.
- protomyth 13y agoAfter all these years, I only value the legislation a politician introduces, official actions in office, and their votes. Everything else is too hard to figure out the intent or sincerity. This might be from having politicians in the 90's lie to my face and then vote totally different.
- hga 13y agoAnd you've got to be careful with those votes. E.g. the common Senate trick of voting for cloture, that is, the end of modern version of the filibuster which needs 60 votes (not that that is likely to survive very long now that the "nuclear option" has been launched) and then voting against the bill. That gives 9-10 Senators room for posturing, and underlines how you need to learn some of each house's procedures to know what's really going on. Not all that much, that plus paying attention to a few bills you consider telling, and a little search fu on thomas.gov the day after a vote goes a long way. ADDED: For the House, you need to learn, generally from other sources, the rules under which a bill was brought to the floor and the associated votes. Whatever you knew about the Senate is now subject to abrupt change: among other things, the nuclear option was launched with a majority vote of the Senators, and the sources I've been reading say a rules change by majority vote was either unprecedented or not done for more than a century. Senate Majority Leader Reid has also de facto changed rules like the ability to offer amendments (the words of art are "filling the amendment tree"), and has recently? formally stated that right is over. Lord knows what's going to happen when the Republicans regain control of the Senate someday; even the "why can't we all be friends?" Republican Senate old bulls are very unhappy about these changes.
- protomyth 13y agoYep, or the voting against a bill you like in the Senate so you can bring it up again. It saddens me that reporters don't explain the rules to people. The misreporting on what a vote means and why some voted Yeah to one vote and Nay to another really bugs me. Certain news outlets have actually lied about what was going on. It is a bit hard to follow. Locally, one ND reporter followed the ND session on twitter and did a remarkably good job including explaining the reasons for the 1 vote in a 99-1 vote that looked correct but could have been horribly (and maliciously) misreported. [edit] as to the "nuclear option" - very short-sited and makes one see that Pres. Clinton was a much better manager of the executive branch.
- rayiner 13y agoA lot of these are either politically impossible or not within the President's power to implement to begin with: 2) Protect "privacy rights" of foreigners: Foreigners don't have privacy rights under our Constitution, and by and large Americans don't have a problem with the NSA spying on foreigners. Indeed, that's the purpose of the NSA. 5) Stop undermining internet security: what does this even mean? Should the NSA stop figuring out how to break encryption? Stop inserting backdoors into equipment sold to China? Again, that's the purpose of the NSA. 7) Reject the third party doctrine: the third party doctrine is a legal doctrine; the President cannot reject it, only the Supreme Court. It's a mistake to believe that just because many Americans are upset with the NSA over recent revelations, that they embrace the leftist/globalist sentiments that are common in the tech community with regards to the NSA. To the extent the public opposes the NSA programs, they oppose mass-collection of call data from Americans. That's it.
- tptacek 13y agoThere's a widely held belief that the way NSA stockpiles exploits harms Internet security. One plausible way that could be true is if NSA sources exploits from researchers who would otherwise sell them to places that would disclose them to vendors, which NSA won't do. And, obviously, there's the widely held (and very plausible) belief that NSA backdoored random number generator standards. Those backdoors probably aren't currently doing much harm to the Internet, because they aren't in use on systems whose random numbers we (a) care much about and (b) are exposed 32 bytes at a time. But still, it's reasonable to expect NSA to stop doing that kind of thing.
- rayiner 13y agoI don't think those sorts of reforms are unreasonable, and go to the general issue of cabining the scope of the NSA to foreign instead of domestic surveillance. However, I think they're probably too esoteric for a political solution. I'd imagine this is just something the standards bodies will have to deal with.
- tptacek 13y ago
- ye 13y ago2 out 12 would be lucky.
- mcphilip 13y agoAnd now for the dog and pony show wherein politicians will compete to "always make use of a good crisis", jockeying for position to see who wins the most political capital by creating the harshest sounding reprimand of the NSA with the least actual consequences. I fully expect the NSA reform to make even the financial reform look harsh in comparison.
- kdragon 13y agoThe NSA very likely have secret information to blackmail President Obama and other important political figures. Daniel Ellsberg agrees with this sentiment (which he mentions in his recent reddit AMA), and Russell Tice confirmed this possibility when becoming an NSA whistleblower in 2006: "On June 19, 2013, Tice claimed while being interviewed that the NSA had spied on Barack Obama while he was a senator, along with monitoring federal judges, ranking military officials, and other members of Congress, saying he himself had seen and held papers ordering such actions.[12][13] He went on to say, "This thing is incredible what NSA has done. They've basically turned themselves—in my opinion—into a rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities on a monstrous scale on steroids"." Remember, this has already happened very recently in our nation's history, during J. Edgar Hoover's direction of the FBI: "Hoover became a controversial figure, as evidence of his secretive actions became known. His critics have accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of the FBI.[1] He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,[2] and to collect evidence using illegal methods.[3] Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten sitting Presidents.[4]" This part of american history needs to be shouted from the mountain tops. "The Burglary" and COINTELPRO need to be mandatory teaching subjects in our schools. It's not a conspiracy theory to suspect NSA of controlling politics and activism through blackmail and coercion. This is exactly what has happened before with Hoover's FBI, and there's every reason to believe this is happening again with the NSA.
- RankingMember 13y agoInteresting. I knew a bit about Hoover, but not to that extent. Can you edit in your numbered sources?
- valarauca1 13y agoThe numbers are citations on the J Edgar Hoover's wikipedia page. The comment (you speak of) is copied verbatim. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
- ihsw 13y ago
- esbranson 13y ago> 4. National Security Letters need prior judicial review and should never be accompanied by a perpetual gag order. See also 18 USC 2705(b): > A governmental entity acting under [18 USC 2703(d)] [...] may apply to a court for an order commanding a provider of electronic communications service or remote computing service to whom a warrant, subpoena, or court order is directed, for such period as the court deems appropriate, not to notify any other person of the existence of the warrant, subpoena, or court order. Note that 18 USC 2703 and 18 USC 2705 were part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.
- nfoz 13y agoI wish we could add: "Pardon Snowden" But I suppose that's in the realm of fantasy?
- hajderr 13y agoThis guy makes me so angry. I will never believe anything he says. Also, he has a greater strategy, and doing occasional flirting is not gonna make me trust him.
- mschuster91 13y agoUh, does anyone have this in cleartext form? I'm on a EDGE connection and it looks like the darn thing is all-images.
- sp332 13y agohttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fthedaywefightback.org%2Fobama-scorecard%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache... The text on the scorecard picture is repeated below it in plain text, plus commentary.