As well he
should. We went from a culture of
complete secrecy and outright disregard for anyone’s ‘natural’ rights to sudden
disclosure of just how much they had. It
was so bad that they did not and still do not know what they have. Worse it was completely open to simple data
mining. It was an accident waiting to
happen.
This polices up
the problem whether government wishes it or not. It does not solve the whole problem but it
puts a standard in place and oversight.
This will not stop spying generally but that is another problem that
must be dealt with differently.
There is an
apparent solution to security issues and personal privacy that will likely be
implemented over the next decade and all this can be come mute.
Edward Snowden
Declares Victory
By Brett LoGiurato | Business
Insider – 34 minutes ago
In this image made from video released by WikiLeaks
on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, former National Security Agency systems analyst
Edward Snowden smiles during a presentation ceremony for the Sam Adams Award in
Moscow, Russia.
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward
Snowden on Tuesday hailed President Barack Obama's plan to reform the
NSA's bulk surveillance programs as
a "turning point" in the debate over privacy and security. Snowden's
statement was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is
coordinating his legal representation as he faces charges for leaking a massive
cache of classified files that sparked a massive public debate about the NSA's
activities.
"This is a turning point, and it marks the
beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the NSA and restore the
public's seat at the table of government," Snowden said.
Late Monday night, the White House announced
Obama intends to introduce legislation
that would drastically reform the way the
NSA collects "metadata" from Americans' phone calls. By doing
this, Snowden said Obama admitted the NSA's bulk data collection programs
are "in fact unnecessary."
"The very first open and adversarial court to
ever judge these programs has now declared them 'Orwellian'
and 'likely unconstitutional.' ...
Congress is considering historic, albeit incomplete reforms. And President
Obama has now confirmed that these mass surveillance programs, kept secret from
the public and defended out of reflex rather than reason, are in fact
unnecessary and should be ended," Snowden said.
Obama's coming legislative proposal would eliminate
perhaps the most controversial aspect of the NSA's collection
methods — the government's routine collection of Americans' call
data, and it would serve as the biggest change to the agency since Snowden's
documents became public last year.
Under the legislation, which will have to be passed
by Congress, the NSA would no longer collect and store so-called metadata from
Americans' phones in bulk, leaving that to phone companies. T he federal
government would be required to obtain individual orders from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to get records from phone companies.
The NSA currently retains phone data for five years, but under the proposal,
phone companies would only be required to hold the data for 18 months.
Obama's proposal will be one of a handful Congress
considers. The bipartisan leaders of the House Intelligence Committee unveiled
a similar plan on Tuesday. A t a press conference in The Netherlands on
Tuesday, Obama talked up the merits of his plan.
"I’m confident that it allows us to do what is
necessary in order to deal with the dangers of a terrorist attack, but does so in
a way that addresses some of the concerns that people have raised," Obama
said. "And I’m looking forward to working with Congress to make sure that
we go ahead and pass the enabling legislation quickly so that we can get on
with the business of effective law enforcement."
Snowden has come under increased scrutiny over the
past few days after unnamed U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal they
were "very nervous" about Russia's recent ability to
evade NSA spying methods. The story
never mentioned Snowden, who is currently living in Russia under asylum, but it
clearly implied he had somehow aided the regime of Russian President Vladimir
Putin.
No comments:
Post a Comment