thenatureofmind

Obama's NSA blind spot

President Obama's recent speech on government surveillance is dominating the conversation, but he won't be making the key decisions on the future of the National Security Agency's collection of domestic phone data. The statutory provision authorizing these massive sweeps expires June 1, 2015. If Congress simply does nothing, the NSA's domestic spying program will soon come to a screeching halt.

The question is whether Americans will seize this opportunity to gain critical perspective on the crisis responses of the George W. Bush years. Voters elected and reelected Obama precisely because he promised to engage in this decisive reappraisal. But his speech failed to redeem this promise.

Obama's NSA blind spot - latimes.com.

Human Rights Watch says Obama not gone far enough on NSA reforms

U.S. President Barack Obama has not gone far enough in reforming the monitoring activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) and is continuing to violate the privacy rights of individuals, the head of Human Rights Watch told Reuters.

On Friday, Obama banned eavesdropping on the leaders of allies and began reining in the vast collection of U.S. citizens' phone data, seeking to reassure Americans and foreigners that the United States would take into account privacy concerns highlighted by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations.

Human Rights Watch says Obama not gone far enough on NSA reforms | Reuters.

From Messiah to Mediocrity

Few of the speeches President Barack Obama has delivered during his tenure in office illustrate his transformation from messiah to mediocrity, a middle of the pack president likely to fit in somewhere between Rutherford B. Hayes and Martin Van Buren, quite as well as his tepid, inadequate, and something-for-everyone but much-less-than-meets-the-eye speech on NSA reforms on Friday. At just the moment when the country needed the constitutional scholar who was bold enough to speak truth to power -- the man who many of us thought we were electing in 2008 and then again in 2012 -- we instead got the wobbly, vague, "trust me" of a run-of-the-mill po

From Messiah to Mediocrity.

Why Obama's NSA Reforms Won't Solve Silicon Valley's Trust Problem

When Barack Obama announced his reforms of National Security Agency surveillance programs today, few people were as interested as Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Marissa Mayer, and Steve Ballmer.

And the president knew it. The official order he released as he spoke — Presidential Policy Directive/PPD-28, which laid out the changes he was making — included a bow to the tech giants. High up in the document, he acknowledged that the nation’s intelligence-gathering activities risk “a potential loss of international trust in U.S. firms [and]…the credibility of our commitment to an open, interoperable, and secure global Internet.” In the battle to balance national security with vital civil liberties, the tech industry has suffered the most severe collateral damage, as trust in its products has indeed eroded. Today the president had the opportunity to cut Silicon Valley a break.

Why Obama's NSA Reforms Won't Solve Silicon Valley's Trust Problem | Wired.com.

Is Obama Failing Constitutional Law?

In his speech meant to quell concerns over government surveillance, President Obama on Friday offered something of a primer on the history of espionage, from the heroic patrols made by Paul Revere in the Revolution to the sordid eavesdropping the FBI perpetrated against Martin Luther King, Jr.

The history lesson—triggered, of course, by the revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which laid bare some of how Obama’s government goes about the business of spying—prefaced a series of reform proposals in which the president put himself forward as the Great Balancer, the one who understands the risks and benefits of spying programs, while also remaining mindful of the competing concerns of liberty and security. “We have to make some important decisions about how to protect ourselves,” Obama said, “while upholding the civil liberties and privacy protections that our ideals—and our Constitution—require.”

Is Obama Failing Constitutional Law? - Jonathan Hafetz - POLITICO Magazine.

In Keeping Grip on Data Pipeline, Obama Does Little to Reassure Industry

Google, which briefly considered moving all of its computer servers out of the United States last year after learning how they had been penetrated by the National Security Agency, was looking for a public assurance from President Obama that the government would no longer secretly suck data from the company’s corner of the Internet cloud.

Microsoft was listening to see if Mr. Obama would adopt a recommendation from his advisers that the government stop routinely stockpiling flaws in its Windows operating system, then using them to penetrate some foreign computer systems and, in rare cases, launch cyberattacks.

In Keeping Grip on Data Pipeline, Obama Does Little to Reassure Industry - NYTimes.com.

NSA Whistleblowers Point To Obama's Omissions in NSA Speech

TED: Mikko Hypponen: How the NSA betrayed the world's trust -- time to act

Julian Assange On Obama NSA Speech 'We Heard a Lot of Lies in This Speech by Obama'

Pentagon & NSA Officials: Assassinate Edward Snowden

President Obama claims the right to extrajudicially execute American citizens, keeps a so-called "kill list," and has bragged he's "really good at killing people." This isn't bluster. Obama has backed this up with action, having killed U.S. citizens - including a 16-year-old boy – without charging, much less convicting, any of them with a single crime.

The implications are profound (and profoundly disturbing), and raise questions about Americans' constitutional right to due process, the most basic constraints on presidential power, and our treatment of whistleblowers. Indeed, how can anyone expect those who witness executive-branch crimes to blow the whistle when the head of the executive branch asserts the right to instantly execute anyone he pleases at any time?

Pentagon & NSA Officials: Assassinate Edward Snowden.