[bestbits] Obama's NSA speech: an affirmation that mass surveillance has a future

[Guru गुरु]

excerpt

"The Mozilla Foundation – the internet non-profit that makes, among 
other things, the Firefox browser – reacted to Obama’s speech in a way 
that pointed to the path not taken. “Overall, the strategy seems to be 
to leave current intelligence processes largely intact and improve 
oversight to a degree,” it said in a statement. “We’d hoped for, and the 
internet deserves, more. Without a meaningful change of course, the 
internet will continue on its path toward a world of balkanization and 
distrust, a grave departure from its origins of openness and opportunity.”

Whatever direction that path takes, Obama has reaffirmed the NSA’s 
largely unfettered ability to exploit it. The reality is that the limits 
of technology – not policy, which can be manipulated, and not law, which 
can be finessed – are the NSA’s most important restrictions...."

end excerpt

This is something for global civil society to take serious note of and 
respond to. And apart from responding, civil society needs to work 
pro-actively to end the current USG dominance which enables inter alia, 
such widespread surveillance.

regards,
Guru

source - 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/17/obama-nsa-speech-surveillance-reforms-fight?CMP=twt_gu

Barack Obama’s rhetoric in his big surveillance speech 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/17/obama-nsa-reforms-end-storage-americans-call-data?CMP=twt_fd&CMP=SOCxx2I2> 
on Friday was pleasing to privacy advocates. But the substance of his 
proposals for the future of mass data collection amount to a gift for 
the National Security Agency.

The battle over the future of surveillance now shifts from the White 
House to Capitol Hill, where Obama conceded that legislation will be 
necessary on practically all of his desired proposals – terrain very 
favorable to the NSA, and where it has a major opportunity to rebrand 
itself with a forthcoming leader.

Obama’s remarks about the importance of privacy obscured that he has not 
closed any door on the world’s most powerful surveillance agency. The 
ones that appear closed depend on crucial details that Obama has left 
unresolved, even after seven months of congressional hearings 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/nsa-files-us-intelligence-officials-testify-in-congress-live-coverage>, 
two conflicting 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/judge-rules-nsa-phone-data-collection-legal> 
public federal court rulings 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/nsa-phone-surveillance-likely-unconstitutional-judge>, 
and a voluminous report 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/18/nsa-bulk-collection-phone-date-obama-review-panel>by 
his own surveillance advisers.

Most significant is Obama’s call for the government to relinquish the 
collection of records of every phone call made 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/14/nsa-review-panel-senate-phone-data-terrorism> 
in the United States. But it’s too soon to determine if bulk collection 
actually ends, or merely transfers to a private custodian on behalf of 
the NSA. Obama did not resolve whether a post-government collection of 
metadata ought to require an individualized showing of a plausible 
connection to terrorism, which would be determined in advance by a judge 
in all but exceptional cases.

That’s how investigations over personal data typically work, and the 
reason why the laws governing them have always been about the terms 
under which the government can get the data in the first place. But NSA 
has argued, with great success, that the relevant privacy protection 
ought to surround when it gets to study the data – taking its access to 
the data for granted.

The mere fact that the data will transition out of government hands is 
less than meets the eye. Obama conceded to NSA’s favor a point in 
serious dispute: that the NSA must have access to a massive pool of 
domestic phone data.

Once that concession is made, the logical contour of a private 
repository for metadata storage lends itself to being comprehensive – 
far beyond the current amount of data each company holds before purging 
it. In order for metadata analysis to add any value at all, NSA has said 
it needs the whole “haystack” to find hidden connections to terrorism. 
Conceding the need for the haystack lends itself to gathering all the 
hay, whether at Fort Meade or by an intermediary.

NSA director General Keith Alexander, Deputy AG James Cole, Attorney 
General Eric Holder, and Senator Patrick Leahy.National Security Agency 
Director General Keith Alexander, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, 
Attorney General Eric Holder, and Senator Patrick Leahy. Photograph: 
Carolyn Kaster/AP

But that necessity has been called into question. NSA and its allies 
have lately been given to a different metaphor: not of the haystack, but 
what NSA deputy director John C Inglis last week called an “insurance 
policy 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/nsa-mass-surveillance-powers-john-inglis-npr>”. 
That contention – a more intellectually honest construction – reflects 
that the phone data has not, as the NSA initially and forcefully 
misrepresented, prevented US terror attacks. The greatest 
counter-terrorist effect the NSA has identified through its mass phone 
data processing, in 12 years of existence, has been the identification 
of a financial transfer to a Somali affiliate 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/18/nsa-chief-house-hearing-surveillance-live> 
of al-Qaida from San Diego.

All that ought to prompt celebration at Fort Meade. Privacy advocates 
evidently did not persuade Obama to definitively end what is by far the 
most domestically controversial of all the surveillance activities 
disclosed by Edward Snowden.

Not only will the NSA (and its allies at the office of the director of 
national intelligence) spend the next several weeks in part advising 
Obama on what a post-government, metadata custodian ought to look like, 
the agency will be a major player in shaping the legislation that will 
bring such a custodian into existence, owing to its advocates in the 
Senate and House intelligence committees. Congress’s default position, 
on a bipartisan basis, is deference to the security agencies.

That isn’t to say the NSA has won. It must first withstand the USA 
Freedom Act 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/nsa-overhaul-bill-legislation-usa-freedom-act>, 
a bipartisan civil libertarian bill to end bulk collection already 
backed by about a quarter of legislators. If the bill passes, creating a 
new comprehensive metadata storehouse, or forcing telecoms to retain 
data for years, will be exceptionally difficult. And the standards of 
evidence the NSA or the FBI must meet before a judge to gain access to 
the records will inevitably rise, a critical civil liberties protection.

Beyond the domestic metadata collection, the surveillance landscape 
after Obama’s speech looks remarkably clear for NSA.

Obama placed no durable restriction on the mass collection of foreign 
citizens, merely tasking the attorney general and director of national 
intelligence to come up with proposals for giving foreigners abroad more 
privacy safeguards. Foreign leaders did somewhat better than their 
billions of citizens, with “allies” receiving Obama's assurance that 
they won’t be spied upon absent a “national security” rationale – 
significant caveats, and applying already to an infinitesimal fraction 
of the billions of communications gathered by NSA every day.

Consider the following construction by Obama:

“In terms of our bulk collection of [overseas] signals intelligence, US 
intelligence agencies will only use such data to meet specific security 
requirements: counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism, 
counter-proliferation, cybersecurity, force protection for our troops 
and our allies, and combating transnational crime, including sanctions 
evasion."

That’s even broader than it sounds. Those already-expansive policy goals 
only govern the use of data, not its collection in the first place. And 
it sets up the tricky problem of how the NSA can determine whether any 
of that enormous data trove is useful without studying it in the first 
place.

CIA director John Brennan left, talks with the director of national 
intelligence James Clapper before Barack Obama outlined his NSA 
reforms.CIA director John Brennan talks with the director of national 
intelligence James Clapper. Photograph: Jim WatsonAFP/Getty Images

Any additional safeguards on other aspects of the NSA’s powers remain 
subject to a dizzying array of reviews, despite the numerous ones 
already performed, and which were supposed to inform White House policy. 
There have been reviews to determine when the NSA can tweak encryption 
standards; reviews to determine the institutional writ of a privacy 
advocate before the secret surveillance court that oversees it; reviews 
to determine the closure of an authority allowing the NSA to search, 
without a warrant, through its foreign-derived data troves for American 
identifying information. All these reviews provide the NSA with 
additional opportunities to make sure it maintains as much flexibility 
and power as possible.

And it has another one coming up. General Keith Alexander and his deputy 
Inglis are both stepping down. The next director of the NSA will inherit 
a post-Snowden agency, and has a tremendous opportunity to attempt a 
public reset. While it’s too soon to tell whether Alexander's successor 
will seize that opportunity, Washington loves to confuse a new person in 
charge with an institutional overhaul. If the only thing NSA has lost so 
far is a PR campaign, the rematch is set to begin this spring.

NSA has whined for months that the White House has not ridden to its 
rescue. That whine turned out to be unfounded. “We cannot unilaterally 
disarm our intelligence agencies” is probably the most durably 
significant line of Obama’s speech, and the sentence that will have the 
greatest resonance as a guide to the NSA’s future, especially compared 
to anything he said about the importance of liberty.

The Mozilla Foundation – the internet non-profit that makes, among other 
things, the Firefox browser – reacted to Obama’s speech in a way that 
pointed to the path not taken. “Overall, the strategy seems to be to 
leave current intelligence processes largely intact and improve 
oversight to a degree,” it said in a statement.

“We’d hoped for, and the internet deserves, more. Without a meaningful 
change of course, the internet will continue on its path toward a world 
of balkanization and distrust, a grave departure from its origins of 
openness and opportunity.”

Whatever direction that path takes, Obama has reaffirmed the NSA’s 
largely unfettered ability to exploit it. The reality is that the limits 
of technology – not policy, which can be manipulated, and not law, which 
can be finessed – are the NSA’s most important restrictions.


-- 

Gurumurthy Kasinathan
Director, IT for Change
In Special Consultative Status with the United Nations ECOSOC
www.ITforChange.Net <http://www.itforchange.net/> | Cell:91 9845437730 | 
Tel:91 80 26654134, 26536890
http://karnatakaeducation.org.in/KOER/en/index.php/Subject_Teacher_Forum