Obama’s Changes to Government Surveillance

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/17/us/nsa-changes-graphic.html?hp

by 001sky • 13 years ago

174 183 13 years ago

nytimes.com

WalterSear• 13 years ago

Just enough to make it look like he's doing >something<.

kungfooey• 13 years ago

Wow, I love how this is presented. Kudos to the NYT for creating new ways for us to consume this information.

ck22• 13 years ago

None. There are no changes. He is reviewing a transition to changes.

And remember, these are only executive changes, which means if the next president is worse, well then the changes can be undone with the stroke of a single pen by a single person (and they might even decide not to tell the public).

The permanent bulk collection of data continues for future use by any president or agency when the laws don't hinder them. It's a library they can peruse now or 50 years from now.

ps. someone needs to do a mashup of his first campaign speech to end abuses, arguing against this other person

res0nat0r2• 13 years ago

Yes but bulk metadata collection hasn't been ruled illegal...

tribe2• 13 years ago

This is exactly the problem. As ck2 seems to be suggesting, laws should be passed which make it illegal. At least, that is how I interpreted her critiques of "executive changes"

rtpg3• 13 years ago

from what I recall most of the data programs wouldn't keep stuff after 5 years, but that's slightly pedanting (on your "50 years" comment).

He could ask congress to pass laws, but he's the executive, and considering the executive's contempt for all things from congress, down to the right of congress to check the executive's use of the military (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution#Questions...), one can't hope for too much. At the very least, these executive orders being put into place means that he's signaling Congress that he wouldn't necessarily be against rollbacks of certain points.

If you want a law passed, ask Congress.

CodeMage• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation":

Lundin Crast said, "And where is the analysis?"

"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications in short, all the goo and dribble he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."

27182818284• 13 years ago

Ever since the first time I've read that, I've wanted newspapers to do that. Then when I learned about diffs and similar styles, I've wanted it to be done with strikethroughs or red -- and ++ marking up the actual speech's text.

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

ps. someone needs to do a mashup of his first campaign speech to end abuses, arguing against this other person

Here you go. It's rather painful to watch, as you might expect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8

(FYI, I did not make this video)

tigersharktopus• 13 years ago

Voted for change. Obama is the one who changed.

blisterpeanuts3• 13 years ago

Yes, the infamous 2007 speech that has come back to haunt him. Every politician has a speech like that, but this one is a real whopper, up there with "You can keep your plan".

First rule of politics: never make a promise you can't keep. Second rule of politics: never keep a promise you don't have to.

PythonicAlpha8• 13 years ago

Looks to me, as somebody had taken the guts out of the puppet. It is really a sad thing to watch.

mark_integerdsv• 13 years ago

You are quite right. That was not easy to watch.

Most of all because as I read the body language, Candidate Obama passionately believed in what he was saying. The words march out proud and true, like soldiers.

President Obama seems barely shadow of the man in the earlier clips. He stumbles over the most important parts of his delivery and seems at one stage to hesitate as he asks himself if he can actually say what he is about to say.

Something is wrong with the man in the more recent clips. Emotionally he seems unwell.

panarky• 13 years ago

Before the US invaded Iraq, when the President was talking about mushroom clouds [0] and the Secretary of State delivered a PowerPoint about bio-weapons to the United Nations [1], I gave our leaders the benefit of the doubt.

Surely the military, the CIA, the NSA, the NRO, and the President must have secret information they cannot share with the public to justify the horrors of war.

Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to justify a predetermined agenda.

After the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, when the President and the Secretary of the Treasury threatened the end of the world as we know it if the richest corporations aren't given direct cash infusions [2], I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Surely our elected officials would never directly transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest of the rich unless the alternative was truly grave.

Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to transfer wealth from working people to the ownership class on an unprecedented scale.

So when the President stands before us today and speaks for 45 minutes without saying anything of consequence, without providing any evidence that the threat is so dire, so imminent, so cataclysmic that we must relinquish our freedoms to preserve our freedoms, I can no longer give him the benefit of the doubt.

No more vague threats. No more fear. No more intimidation. No more secrecy. These are fatal to a political system that relies on an informed citizenry.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9BJ_Kh7mE

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/business/26bailout.html?pa...

jaibot• 13 years ago

The financial crisis was probably extremely dire.

notdrunkatall3• 13 years ago

It's refreshing to find someone who gets it.

r0h1n• 13 years ago

Joshua Topolsky put it best:

America we are under constant, vague, terrifying attack. There is no end. There will never be an end.

http://twitter.com/joshuatopolsky/status/424220069003288577

coldtea3• 13 years ago

So when the President stands before us today and speaks for 45 minutes without saying anything of consequence, without providing any evidence that the threat is so dire, so imminent, so cataclysmic that we must relinquish our freedoms to preserve our freedoms, I can no longer give him the benefit of the doubt.

It gets worse: people who do such things, can also manufacture concrete evidence of "dire and imminent" stuff.

For example by letting the stock market crumble to some predetermined stop point, when they come with measures to save the day. Or by provoking for some attack and seeing it happen -- which is mostly what was done in Pearl Harbor to convince people to get in WWII (E.g: http://mises.org/daily/6312/FDRs-Pacific-War-Before-Pearl-Ha... -- Can't vouch for the validity of the linked website in general, just found a quick link to the issue. The facts are available in tons of historical books).

dobbsbob2• 13 years ago

Secret intel court can undo any changes too

a3n4• 13 years ago

They could all just lie. Congress isn't going to ask them anything, and they aren't going to tell.

jcutrell• 13 years ago

Do not "subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption" or standards.

I wish so bad that there was at least some kind of address for this. I highly doubt it will hit mainstream attention anytime soon again unless some kind of publicly accessible (read: marketable) scandal occurs to bring the news media around again.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

I figure that one is way too abstract for him to address in a speech anyway, so I'm not surprised to see it wasn't mentioned. (This article specifically discusses his speech)

aetherson• 13 years ago

It is absolutely not "too abstract" to address in a speech. He could have said something like, "This administration regards the technologies of public cryptography as a crucial piece of modern life, and an underpinning of liberty on the internet. As such, I am directing the NSA to under no circumstances attempt to weaken such standards."

If JFK could say, "We're gonna go to the moon, I have no idea how," then Obama can say, "The NSA will not undermine cryptography standards."

spikels• 13 years ago

OBAMA DECISION: Not addressed in speech.

gaius2• 13 years ago

I expected this to go to a 404.

peterkelly• 13 years ago

304 Not Modified

coldcode• 13 years ago

I made a connection to the whitehouse.gov requesting to get change.html and all I got was a 304 error.

Zikes• 13 years ago

No stopgaps on data collection, only increased permissions to access the stored data. No word on how difficult it is to acquire those increased permission levels, could simply be an additional form to file.

NSLs remain nearly untouched. "Warrants" will continue to be issued with negligible oversight.

Create a panel of advocates to represent privacy concerns in significant cases.

Because the process remains secretive with no constant public advocate presence, there's no reasonable way to initiate the process to determine what is a "significant case". Just as before, we cannot contest breaches of privacy if we are not aware of them.

rtpg3• 13 years ago

NSLs remain nearly untouched.

this is the single most dangerous thing about current law enforcement. NSLs completely subvert any recourse to the judiciary without immense risk to yourself. Luckily most judges seem to agree on the ridiculousness of NSLs , and are trying to whittle down the power they have.

m52go4• 13 years ago

This is the same man who began an initiative called the Open Government Initiative before any Snowden revelations.

"My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and estabish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/open

Believing anything Obama SAYS, particularly concerning this issue, is foolish.

Look at what he's DONE. Nothing is changing.

thebouv• 13 years ago

Granted, believing anything ANY politician says on any issue is particularly foolish.

wittyphrasehere2• 13 years ago

then what's the point of politicians?

m52go4• 13 years ago

That's what you would think, but somehow people always end up thinking the next one will be different.

I find it particularly unsettling when people off the street justify Obama in their own words.

They've truly been brainwashed--no other way to put it. Scary.

lukifer• 13 years ago

Vilifying "politicians" is a convenient way to let We The People off the hook for tolerating broken democratic and electoral processes.

saraid2164• 13 years ago

Um. There has been a notable increase in the level of openness in government. Open Government isn't an initiative for making the privacy geeks happy. It's an initiative to make already-public data accessible and usable, and to increase the amount of data available. Federal agencies and lower-tier governments (states, counties, cities) were given a mandate and timeline to do this to their data.

OGI has nothing to do with the NSA and never has.

blisterpeanuts3• 13 years ago

Obama "acknowledges" Edward Snowden's role in triggering a public debate. Does this mean Mr. Snowden is officially a whistleblower-hero, or still a traitor who deserves life imprisonment?

As for the notion of requiring private telecomm companies to store data and provide access to the gov't, although still just a hypothetical situation and not yet policy, would this not simply shift the burden from the NSA to private companies?

Obviously, they're already handing over the data, but making it all official and open seems like a retrogressive policy that would in the long run backfire as Americans turn to overseas hosted services not beholden to the NSA. Perhaps even the domestic telecomm firms could get around it by offshoring their data storage and transmission services, such that the only domestic components would be the towers and switches, while the repositories of customer data would be safely overseas under some other entity's control (also not ideal, argh).

diminoten6• 13 years ago

What Obama said is pretty clear:

"The fact is, is that Mr. Snowden's been charged with 3 felonies. If in fact he believes that what he did was right, then, like every American citizen, he can come here, appear before the court with a lawyer and make his case."

What Obama thinks Snowden "deserves" is irrelevant. Snowden's status as a "traitor" is as yet undetermined, and until he stands trial for the crimes he's being charged with, we won't know.

evan_• 13 years ago

What Obama thinks Snowden "deserves" is irrelevant.

Sort of. Obama has the ability to pardon Snowden, if he felt strongly about it.

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

Even if Snowden were to return to the US to face "justice," as one of his supporters I would expect nothing more than a show trial.

We'd be relying on a legal system that has already been completely compromised to render political outcomes rather than legal ones, and there's too many "powerful" people who have been shown to be terrible liars and dishonest by Snowden's revelations for him to get a fair shake.

Crito3• 13 years ago

"If in fact he believes that what he did was right, then, like every American citizen, he can come here, appear before the court with a lawyer and make his case."

What you see here is Obama conflating (intentionally, of course) the notion of "right" and "legal".

Snowden thinks what he did was right. He does not believe that will save him in a court room, which in theory determines legality. That is why he fled the country; not because he does not really believe that what he did was right.

AutoCorrect3• 13 years ago

We would probably end up with Edith Snowden (Like Bradley, er Chelsea Manning). Seriously - with Gitmo et al, why would anyone put themselves at the tender mercies of our justice system when high-level personnel have it out for them?

tootie4• 13 years ago

You're a traitor the second you commit treason. You just can't be sent to jail until it's proven in court. Most of the recent attempts to convict people on espionage or similar charges have failed in court. Manning's case is still pending. Snowden would almost certainly be convicted of something. Treason seems highly unlikely.

benmathes• 13 years ago

No reason to trust, no way to verify.

mindslight• 13 years ago

Amazingly, both its subject and this "article" itself are covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7077982

wittyphrasehere2• 13 years ago

which for some reason is being kept off the front page...

jey• 13 years ago

Stories with "NSA" in the title get an extra penalty applied to them.

hawkharris• 13 years ago

A century or two from now, when other nations reflect on the rise and fall of the United States, the Bush-Obama era will be one of the most striking because of how it fundamentally changed civil rights and the relationship between government and the press.

ye• 13 years ago

Wait till US elects the next president, likely a republican.

rtpg3• 13 years ago

Has the relationship between the government and the press really changed that much? The pentagon papers happened before, and the gov't didn't much like that.

Civil rights have definitely gotten worse in the past 15 years, but I'd say they're still better than before 1978 (when FISA was written). Before things like the FISA, the executive was pretty free to do almost anything (and did, see Hoover). As a long term trend, civil rights have been increasing, not decreasing. We've made mistakes that we need to roll back, but acting like this is the fall of the United States as we know it is pretty myopic (people have been predicting the fall of the United State since the 1800s), and not putting much faith into our institutions (which aren't the worst).

B-Con• 13 years ago

And yet both had their legions of die-hard supporters who acted like said president could do no wrong. What's that say about the people they governed?

There's just really no way that future textbooks will have anything good to say about this era of American politics. (Unless they're biased or propaganda.)

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

I agree that this era is one for the history books on the topics of civil rights and digital data.

But I doubt very much the context will be the fall of the U.S., because--can you name a nation that is not struggling with these issues? Both in government and in private life?

I think it remains to be seen where it all nets out for each nation. Human society in general is being changed by digital data. I would not bet against the U.S. because we have a history of being pretty good at adapting to social change.

noarchy• 13 years ago

You're assuming that the successors of Bush and Obama won't be as bad or even worse (if that's imaginable...and it is, I think). This era may mark a crucial point at which the collapse of the U.S. accelerated, I'll grant, though we shouldn't paint too rosy a portrait of their predecessors. They had their part to play as well. Every politician likes to use a crisis, especially a blatant failure of the State, in order to increase its power, extract more money from the population, and so forth.

dragonwriter5• 13 years ago

A century or two from now, when other nations reflect on the rise and fall of the United States, the Bush-Obama era will be one of the most striking because of how it fundamentally changed civil rights and the relationship between government and the press.

Aside from the lack of historical perspective rtpg comments on, I think you (And rtpg, too) are confusing "civil rights" and "civil liberties".

lispm• 13 years ago

For me as a German, all this does nothing. It was never and is still not advisable to store data on US servers and it is not advisable to use US IT services. Data is collected by the NSA and will be used by the US in arbitrary ways (economic espionage, extortion, no-fly lists, physical attacks, influencing political decisions, kidnapping, ...) without any international control.

glasz2• 13 years ago

for months everybody is leaning back, watching information we already knew being unveiled. comfortably everybody is waiting for somebody to do something. for politics to correct itself. now politics reacts, everybody is kind of outraged because, you didn't guess it, they don't do anything instead of lamenting utter bullshit and discussions rise again. endless, as you should know by now, useless discussions pointing out this and that but nobody, in the middle of all confusion, reaches the simple conclusion:

you are fucked. we are fucked. we'll get fucked forever if we go on like that.

but i guess it's too hard for us tech people, supposedly highly educated with great intellect, to wrap our head around this. code, business and money are more important.

better go back to sleep, sheep!

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Secret courts, secret opinions, NSLs and government sanctioned lists of "undesirables".

Am I the only one who sees shades of: -Nazi Germany -The USSR -(Cultural Revolution) China -Insert random eastern European cold war regime

dobbsbob2• 13 years ago

You forgot the Disposition Matrix (newspeak) which is the Pentagon list of people to summarily execute.

diogenescynic• 13 years ago

"Changes" but it will all be in secret, so we'll have to take their word for it. Uh huh.

alecco• 13 years ago

  > Third, the legal safeguards that restrict surveillance against U.S. persons
  > without a warrant do not apply to foreign persons overseas. This is not
  > unique to America; few, if any, spy agencies around the world constrain their
  > activities beyond their own borders. And the whole point of intelligence is to
  > obtain information that is not publicly available. But America’s capabilities
  > are unique. And the power of new technologies means that there are fewer and
  > fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special
  > obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.

Thanks. We, foreign consumers of american services and products, will sure remember this one.

glasz2• 13 years ago

you and i, maybe others too. but not the general sheep.

tomelders3• 13 years ago

Apparently all men are not created equal, many are created foreign.

Europe unite.

PavlovsCat2• 13 years ago

Europe unite.

"old Europe die hard" http://i.imgur.com/srtDWIX.jpg

Seen nearly 10 years ago in Cologne, sadly I don't know the name of the artist (it was in a museum, he filled huge walls with such drawings). I know HN frowns on images, but I don't have the eloquence to express what this picture is saying anyway, so I'd rather post that instead of nothing. At least it's not a meme - not yet, anyway. Here's hoping :P

mpyne7• 13 years ago

by that same logic American companies should not purchase SAP or Siemens kit then either, no? Allow me to cite that most pro-Snowden of papers, The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/04/german-...

MatthiasP• 13 years ago

With the difference that there is no law in Germany that forces companies to introduce backdoors into their products.

x00542• 13 years ago

Obama = Change. Change = same shit, different day.

Obama has basically said that he knew about all of this, and he was ok with everything the government was doing. However, now that it's all public knowledge, he thinks that we need changes. Have some testicular fortitude, Mr. President. Either you are ok with what NSA does, or you are not. Don't make a speech where you tell me that you were cool with what NSA was doing all the way up to the point when it became public knowledge. And don't tell me in one sentence that this is an important public debate, and in another condemn the man who brought about this debate, Mr. Snowden.

Obama promised change, but Snowden just might actually deliver on that promise.

aryastark• 13 years ago

Who is going to trust Obama? Then, who is going to trust the NSA?

Only fools. James Clapper lied about what the NSA was up to, to Ron Wyden, a member of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Clapper has still not been charged with anything.

There is no way to oversee an organization that only has to tell you whatever it wants to. Do people really not understand such a basic concept as this? Congress does not have special insight into what the NSA is doing. Everything Congress knows is whatever the NSA wants to tell Congress. It's all a sham. Kangaroo courts and pretend justice. As fake as all that crap North Korea shows tourists. As fake as Saddam's elections in Iraq.

emocakes2• 13 years ago

The US is the "worlds only superpower", “We will not apologize simply because our services may be more effective”..

In other words, nothing is changing, and bad luck if you have an issue with it.

I can honestly say I'm looking forward to China rising.

refurb• 13 years ago

i'm looking forward to China rising

How is China going to help? You think they are going to stick up for privacy and other human rights? Jeeze.

I get the sense a lot of westerns don't know how good they have it even though there system isn't perfect.

emocakes2• 13 years ago

not at all. I just feel it is time that someone else takes the role of world tyrant for a while. Very sick of USA belting out that holier than thou crap.

Istof• 13 years ago

it doesnt matter if the government agency that collects that data is not called the NSA... they still would have it.

aragot• 13 years ago

Big up to the NYTimes. I'm impressed with US newspapers' willingness to speak up despite what they know about the surveillance. Those journalists can expect to be investigated and any wrongdoing will take them to jail. They're brave. We should thank them.

To the people who make those newspapers.

excellence24• 13 years ago

blah blah Obama just talking, trying to keep us on the edge, give the dogs a bone.

These government people move way to slowly, how long does it take with todays technology to communicate and figure out what needs to change? The longer we just keep 'talking', the longer they can continue with their scraping of data and secrets.

Someone or something is going to have the data; there's nothing that can be done about that. Marketers have been doing for a long time, the NSA just got CAUGHT. Marketers use it to make money by making sure you see the best ad for you, the NSA uses it to make money by 'stopping terrorists'. But what if all the data was free and the programs turing it into useful information were open-sourced? That would change the market entirely. Anyone could see the most important scraped news of the day, whether its a terrorist threat or just thrending news. It could be like a social network that everybody has already joined. Privacy would be interesting. Maybe you could only see from others what you choose to share yourself. But thats too long to get into here...

Clearly what needs to be done is this: the data that the NSA collects should only be accessible by the program. It needs to be fully autonomous. The biggest concern with the vast collection of data and secrets is the human element. So we should simply take the human element out of it. Make an open-sourced program and algorithm that reads the data when it needs to and automatically gets the results to those who need to see it. The code could be posted on github and master pulls can be voted on by the whole world, but we can start with just America maybe at first.

All of America shuts down for simple things such as football and the superbowl, dead peoples birthdays, religious holidays. I think we could dedicate a day or two to a simultaneous conversion about important things happening in our country moderated by artificial intelligence and by the end of the day take action on what we agreed upon. Gallup releases 'polls' so quickly, how come nothing comes from those?

But if we don't trust an artificial intelligence then WHO can we trust? Obama? Clapper? The Pope?

We could physically implement this system ourselves if we needed to, after we figure out what we as a nation/world want. There's a data center in Utah. We could literally go there and take control. but how many people would a 'protest' like that require? and if we come to the conclusion that thats the only other option, we should hurry before the military and Google finalize the perfect humanoid robot. Or else all hope might be lost. The people vs armies of drones and robots. Elysium here we come.

kabdib• 13 years ago

Doesn't address reduction or elimination of technical means, and therefore is unacceptable. This can be turned evil with the stroke of a pen.

gremlinsinc• 13 years ago

i voted twice for Obama, i feared for society if we had to deal with more leaders like Bush. to see a hero of mine fall so hard. I personally feel betrayed... i will never trust a republican, but now i can't trust democrats either. the fact is we need to do git clone github.com/germany/pirateparty.git usaTechParty.

A party that upholds the desires of its supporters, even giving thema voice and instituting some form of liquid democracy.

zoom• 13 years ago

Without serious disclosure nothing he says matters.

puppetmaster33• 13 years ago

He is a gifted speaker. He talks, sounds like he said something, but analyze and nothing.

puppetmaster33• 13 years ago

Newspeak

Step 1: We are not listening http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/07/politics/nsa-data-mining Step 2: We will not listen: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/nsa-phone-program-1023...

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Obama’s Changes to Government Surveillance

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