Obama Is Announcing His NSA Reforms Tomorrow - Use This Scorecard To Judge Them

https://thedaywefightback.org/obama-scorecard/

85 92 13 years ago

chewxy• 13 years ago

I'm not optimistic :S

Dirlewanger2• 13 years ago

Wow. 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?

RankingMember3• 13 years ago

I don't understand your frustration here, as I don't see any Obama sympathy in this posting. Was the title different previously?

Dirlewanger2• 13 years ago

Do 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.

d23• 13 years ago

Let'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.

JoeAltmaier7• 13 years ago

That 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• 13 years ago

he 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

dllthomas7• 13 years ago

This is a list of demands, not a list of expectations.

sp3325• 13 years ago

It's simple: Obama's publicly-stated goals are much more optimistic than other politicians'. People identify with the optimism and the goals.

hga11• 13 years ago

I 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.

cmiles74• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Well Gitmo was ordered closed. So it's gone right? Oh yeah.

Announce all you want, it will still be there tomorrow.

AH4oFVbPT4f8• 13 years ago

"We promise to work harder next time to not get caught"

pwelch• 13 years ago

I feel like a pessimist but this what it sounds like during these types of announcements.

sleepyK• 13 years ago

After 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.

JPKab• 13 years ago

While 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• 13 years ago

Personally I don't see the problem with a politician figuring out what their constituents want and doing just that. I hear criticisms of weak politicians just doing whatever seems favorable... isn't that what they're there for? To represent the will of the people?

I don't want to elect someone who will force their ideas into law. I want to elect someone who will force the people's ideas into law. What's wrong with a politician saying "I had this idea, but I changed my mind because the people told me I was wrong"?

ep103• 13 years ago

I'm so tired of this reply, because ultimately it boils down to "The President of the United States was unable to use the bully pulpit to convince Americans that torture is bad."

That's a reflection on the quality of the president, not checks and balances.

hga11• 13 years ago

If true (all I noticed were "Don't move them into my district!", a legit issue), what does that say about Obama's foresight?

Such objections were predictable when he made that pledge, nothing's changed in your claimed reasons of "ignorance and overall un-literacy" and high turnout elderly. It says nothing good if all this was enough to stop him once he became President, whatever the exact reason(s), and it's remains another broken promise.

cincinnatus• 13 years ago

The 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.

protomyth5• 13 years ago

After 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.

hga11• 13 years ago

And 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.

protomyth5• 13 years ago

Yep, 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.

dllthomas7• 13 years ago

Any time the outcome of a vote is overdetermined there is room for manipulation of one's voting record. I'm not sure what to think about, in particular, the practice of voting for cloture and against the bill. In principle, one could consistently hold the position that denying cloture should be reserved for cases of strong rejection (or similar). I am not convinced "use every procedural opportunity to push your agenda, regardless of anything else" is what we want (though I'm not entirely convinced that it isn't, either).

rayiner3• 13 years ago

A 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.

tptacek8• 13 years ago

There'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.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

I 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.

JoeAltmaier7• 13 years ago

Worse yet, the NSA creates exploits of their own. Its not comforting to think you machine was invaded through a backdoor that was meant for the NSA's own use - breached is breached.

Essentially the NSA has been working against the interests of all of the rest of us in a measurable, negative way for years. Weighing that against the admittedly negligible positive results achieved, the NSA becomes little better than a massively-funded exploit-creator who, by the way, we all pay our own money to fund.

protomyth5• 13 years ago

The President with one executive order can tell the NSA / FBI that no American can have data or metadata gathered without a specific, individual warrant. That is well within his power under the US Constitution. Some would say it is his duty to do just that under the Constitution.

Installing backdoors in private equipment might be the first modern case for a 3rd Amendment challenge.

dllthomas7• 13 years ago

2) The constitution does not directly state that foreigners have rights. That does not mean the President cannot state that he views foreigners as having rights X, Y, and Z, and that he is directing the forces and agencies under his command to respect them.

5) It most especially means "stop pushing the use of compromised encryption standards". If there is a weakness for the good guys to exploit, the bad guys will find it as well - it is better that we strive to be secure. Attempting to break encryption standards the world has come to through legitimate processes is an entirely different thing, and totally compatible with that striving to be secure. Backdoors into equipment sold internationally are less of an issue - and the more targeted, the less of an issue - I'm not sure what the right call is there, once we're generally respecting point 2.

7) The president can state that he doesn't believe it is appropriate (bully pulpit...), and can instruct the Justice Department not to rely on it. He could also ask for legislation that closes the loophole explicitly - we already do that for HIPAA.

I'm not saying any of these are politically expedient (though I would prefer the political environment to be such that it is) or likely, but "the President can't do this" is wrong, and "it is not politically expedient" is reason not excuse.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

I said: "either politically impossible or not within the President's power." Recognizing foreigners as having "rights" that constrain the security-related operations of the NSA would be a political non-starter.

Re: "stop pushing the use of compromised encryption standards" is a lot narrower than "stop undermining internet security." Politically, the former might be possible, but the latter certainly wouldn't be, at least to the extent they involve breaking encryption standards and the like.

Finally, while the President could theoretically instruct the Justice department not to rely on the doctrine, he can't "reject it" as the law of the land. He also can't, practically, tell the DOJ not to rely on it. U.S. v. Miller is the underpinning of a huge portion of white-collar and antitrust enforcement activity.

ye• 13 years ago

2 out 12 would be lucky.

mcphilip• 13 years ago

And 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.

kdragon4• 13 years ago

The 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.

RankingMember3• 13 years ago

Interesting. I knew a bit about Hoover, but not to that extent. Can you edit in your numbered sources?

valarauca1• 13 years ago

The 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

ihsw• 13 years ago

there's every reason to believe this is happening again with the NSA

No, there isn't -- there is no such evidence that our elected officials are being coerced by the NSA.

Let me say it again, if such proof is revealed then it would be absolutely terrifying for everybody involved and all over the news (be it MSM or social or whatever). As it stands now there are only claims, and there is a distinct lack of evidence and facts surrounding such claims.

Now, with regards to blackmailing our elected officials, I think we can put it simply as such: the fear of just the possibility that we might be blackmailed is enough to cause self-censorship. This is a historical truth and accepted as self-evident.

That said, our elected officials are no less victims than we are. They are spied on as much as -- if not more than -- us.

Please acknowledge this one thing, if you will acknowledge anything in my post: our elected officials are no less victims than we are.

daeken• 13 years ago

Please acknowledge this one thing, if you will acknowledge anything in my post: our elected officials are no less victims than we are.

If I hire someone to walk around a room punching everyone in the face, my nose may be broken, but I'm not a victim in any real sense. These officials made their choice and it came back to bite them in the ass.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

The OP knows there is no evidence, hence the use of the phrase "every reason to believe". It is believed to be true using reason, not evidence. Its a best deduction.

Your demand for evidence and facts is bogus, since there cant really be any. What we are talking about is what goes on in the mind of an individual. We cant prove that. But we do know that, for want of a better term, implied pressure to conform works. Its the same reason belief in a god works. God knows all and will punish us if we don't follow his rules. So, if we believe in the god/NSA, we do what is wanted because we don't want to be punished.

We know people act like this. We know it is possible that the NSA has information that might damage us, or ones we love. We know what the NSA wants. Therefor we have reason to believe someone who might want to control the NSA won't out of personal fear.

A reasonable deduction, based on what is known and history. No, sorry, no evidence. That one of the nice things about blackmail, there usually isn't because the victim obviously doesn't want to be outed.

Yes, of course the elected officials are victims in this, potentially. But as elected officials, with the power of democracy, they are, IMHO, duty bound to put that aside. Not doing so is selfish cowardice. Some one has to be as brave as Snowden, and I don't see that in our elected officials.

danenania• 13 years ago

The NSA has likely already used its capabilities for blackmail, but it's impossible to confirm because they would never directly blackmail someone, as in "do this or else", because that would be easily traceable to them and cause a PR nightmare.

Instead, people who run afoul of their agenda will have damaging information leaked through seemingly unrelated channels, or be targeted by other law enforcement agencies after parallel construction tip-offs.

This instills more fear and creates stronger influence than the threat of direct blackmail. Rather than being faced with explicit demands, anyone in power with something to hide must continually assess whether anything they say or do could be construed as offensive to the intelligence community.

cpher• 13 years ago

I'm not convinced that blackmail is even effective today. You're assuming that politicians have a sense of shame. Maybe they did in the 1950s, but it's clear they don't today.

hga11• 13 years ago

There's also the changing of what's shameful.

Smoking marijuana, using cocaine a bit? Admitted in an autobiography, there are even pictures of the former.

There are the usual rumors he's homosexual, although his daughters would indicate he's at "worse" bisexual. After getting reelected, this would result in exactly what???

To paraphrase Edwin Edwards, he'd only be in danger if "caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy".

kdragon4• 13 years ago

It's not about feeling shame. It's about political assassination and public ridicule.

Many important political figures have been involved with adulterated sex and illegal drugs. Mass surveillance can uncover these scandals and use them as leverage to coerce and blackmail. The FBI put MLK under mass surveillance, uncovered evidence of his sexual deviancy, and sent him threatening letters in an attempt to suppress his civil rights activism.

esbranson• 13 years ago

4. National Security Letters need prior judicial review and should never be accompanied by a perpetual gag order.

Obama Is Announcing His NSA Reforms Tomorrow - Use This Scorecard To Judge Them

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