Americans want NSA spying reined in [7].
But a poll from November showed that only 11% [8] of Americans trust Obama to actually do anything to rein in spying.
We were right to be skeptical [9] …
Today, Obama announced his fake “reforms” … and he’s not doing anything but putting lipstick on the same ‘old pig [10].
The New York Times notes [11] that Obama’s “reform”:
Largely codifies existing practices.
The Times points out that the reform is meant to placate NSA critics, without actually challenging national security agencies:
The emerging approach, described by current and former government officials who insisted on anonymity in advance of Mr. Obama’s widely anticipated speech, suggested a president trying to straddle a difficult line in hopes of placating foreign leaders and advocates of civil liberties without a backlash from national security agencies. The result seems to be a speech that leaves in place many current programs, but embraces the spirit of reform and keeps the door open to changes later.
The Times includes a revealing quote:
“Is it cosmetic or is there a real thumb on the scale in a different direction?” asked one former government official who worked on intelligence issues. “That’s the question.”
The answer should be obvious.
This is – once again – Obama saying “trust me” [12] … without changing anything.
Obama has repeatedly promised to change policies started in the Bush administration. But – instead of reforming them – he’s reaffirmed them … and made them worse than ever [13].
Obama and the NSA have lied over and over again [14]. They have told the American people (and Congress) to f@ck off [15].
The real message they are sending is:
We hold the power … So we’re going to keep doing what we want, and you can’t do anything to stop us.
And see this [16].
NSA to Congress: F@ck Off [15]
We’ve shown that the NSA has been spying on Congress for some time [17].
The NSA has never denied that it’s spying on Congress. Instead, the NSA first said [18]:
Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons.
And Friday, NSA chief Keith Alexander wrote a letter to Senator Bernie Sanders saying that the NSA cannot reveal whether the agency has been targeting members of Congress in its metadata collection because doing so would violate privacy provisions accorded to civilians in the program:
The telephone metadata program incorporates extraordinary controls to protect Americans’ privacy interests. Among those protections is the condition that NSA can query the metadata only based on phone numbers reasonably suspected to be associated with specific foreign terrorist groups. For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search to determine if any records NSA has received under the program have included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress, other American elected officials, or any other American without that predicate.
Sanders [19]
This is the exact same excuse the NSA and other intelligence agencies have previously given for hiding how many Americans they spy on.
As Wired reported [20] last June:
The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.
That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month [21]: under the broad powers [22] granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by the NSA?
The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room [23], McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.
In other words, the NSA is sending the same message to both the American people and their representatives in Congress: f@ck off.