Tag: NSA

Obama to announce overhaul to NSA program

This should be really interesting….:

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama will announce on Friday a major overhaul of a controversial National Security Agency program that collects vast amounts of basic telephone call data on foreigners and Americans, a senior Obama administration official said.

In an 11 a.m. (1600 GMT) speech at the Justice Department, Obama will say he is ordering a transition that will significantly change the handling of what is known as the telephone “metadata” program from the way the NSA currently handles it.

Obama’s move is aimed at restoring Americans’ confidence in U.S. intelligence practices and caps months of reviews by the White House in the wake of damaging disclosures about U.S. surveillance tactics from former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden

via Exclusive: Obama to announce overhaul to controversial NSA program | Reuters.

This is the part of President Obama’s job that I would not do, even if they offered me a million dollars a day to do it. Doing the balancing act between national security and privacy is not an easy task. On one hand, you have the people who want to protect America from terrorist attacks; on the other, you have those who want to keep the privacy of Americans safe.

The article goes on to say what Obama has in store. I highly recommend that you go read it. Because needless to say; this is going to make many people, on both sides of the argument, very unhappy.

 

AP: Kerry says that the US will get spying right

What he means is, that next time the United States will not get caught spying.

The Story:

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is vowing that a review into NSA surveillance activities will ultimately result in the “right” balance between security and privacy and says outrage over alleged espionage and eavesdropping should not disrupt key trade talks between Europe and the United States.

Speaking in Warsaw after talks with Poland’s foreign minister, Kerry said Tuesday that Europeans and others have “legitimate” questions about the surveillance and that those would be answered in private diplomatic discussions.

“We need to understand that we are all in this together,” Kerry said. “We are all in the effort to be able to provide protection to our citizens. And we have to strike the right balance between protecting our citizens and obviously the privacy of all our citizens. That is a balance that we do try to strike.”

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said he had spoken with Kerry and “we have agreed on closer cooperation between our services on combatting common threats.”

Sikorski also said that trade issues should be separate from surveillance questions.

“These are two separate things, two separate orders. One belongs to Eurpoe itself, to the community,” he said. “The second one is rather national in character, it depends on individual states vis-a-vis the U.S.”

via Associated Press.

I agree with Patrick Buchanan; if I were Merkel and the rest of Europe, I would tell Obama to take a hike.

Bad Optics on David Miranda detention

The left and some on the right are howling about the detention of Glenn Greenwald’s “partner” David Miranda.

The Story via Guardian:

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National SecurityAgency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London‘s Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. Accordingto official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

Greenwald understandably is not amused:

At 6:30 am this morning my time – 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US – I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a “security official at Heathrow airport.” He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been “detained” at the London airport “under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000.”

David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on theNSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.

At the time the “security official” called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official – who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 – said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.

A few things that are not being reported; one, the Guardian paid for the trip. Two, this here, which is being reported by the NYT:

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden. The British authorities seized all of his electronic media — including video games, DVDs and data storage devices — and did not return them, Mr. Greenwald said.

Some people are calling him a “Mule”, and that might very well be true too.

Here is my take on the situation: This is very bad optics, not only for the British Government, but for the United States as well. However, as someone who believes in rule of law. If you are a person, who is well-known or somehow or another related to this person who is well-known and you are carrying stolen documents that rightfully belong to a major Government and you intend on delivering them for illegal distribution; you should expect stuff like this to happen.

This is one of my major gripes with the libertarians of all stripes. They do stuff like this here; and then, when they get arrested, they act like somehow or another their rights have been somehow violated. The truth is, Snowden broke the law and when you break the law, you have to answer for your crimes. Whether abuse happened or not, in Snowden’s claims is totally irrelevant and nothing more than a distraction to the fact that the man was trusted with the secrets of the United States Government and he chose to break the law by revealing them.

If anything, Greenwald, Poitras, and Miranda ought to be charged in accessory to releasing stolen classified documents. Again, this is not about whether the United States made mistakes, this is about someone, who was trusted with classified documents and chose to release them, thereby breaking the law.

Again, let me be absolutely clear, I am not a supporter of the NSA spying program and some of it’s abuses that is being reported. What I am a supporter of, is rule of law and protecting the United States of America, and protecting classified information from getting into the hands of those who want to destroy this Country.  Snowden and Greenwald obviously do not share that feeling and as a result, Snowden broke the law and Greenwald is helping him. For this, both of these men should go to jail for a very long time.

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Update: Fixed rather funny typo in third paragraph after quotes. More coffee! 😛