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Yes, the "Innocence of Muslims" Video Really Did Play a Role in the Benghazi Attacks

by SusannaVolz Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Republican obsession with Benghazi is about to get yet another airing, and as much as I’m loath to waste time on this, I’d like to make a point that even a lot of liberals still seem to be confused about. It’s about the video.

First, a quick recap: A few days after the attacks, the intelligence community believed that the initial street protests in Benghazi had been prompted by anger over the Arabic-language version of the “Innocence of Muslims” video, which had been posted on YouTube a few days earlier. The White House repeated this publicly, and conservatives immediately cried foul. Benghazi was a plain and simple terror attack, they said, and the video had nothing to do with it. The White House was pretending otherwise in order to divert attention from its failure to anticipate and stop the attacks, which might have reflected badly on its overall anti-terrorism efforts in the runup to the 2012 election.

Today, even supporters of the administration acknowledge that the video played no role. Their defense is that at the time the CIA thought the video had inspired protests earlier in the day, and the White House was simply passing along its best knowledge. That turned out to be wrong, but it was the best assessment at the time.

But here’s the thing: it wasn’t wrong. The CIA was mistaken about the existence of protests earlier in the day, but not about the role of the video. David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times has written about this extensively, starting just a few weeks after the attacks, and last December he put together a definitive account of what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Here’s a piece:

The leader of Benghazi’s most overtly anti-Western militia, Ansar al-Shariah, boasted a few months before the attack that his fighters could “flatten” the American Mission. Surveillance of the American compound appears to have been underway at least 12 hours before the assault started.

The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

….There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.

Click here for a fuller account of the video. As Kirkpatrick says, there were a lot of moving parts behind the Benghazi attacks. The entire city was a tinderbox, and plenty of Libyan militants knew the CIA was active there. But the simple fact is that the video played a role. We can argue over how big that role was, and about whether the White House was properly cautious in its public statements. But the best evidence we have from witnesses on the ground is clear: the “Innocence of Muslims” video inspired the initial attacks, which then escalated as armed extremists took over.

That’s it. Blaming the video wasn’t a mistake. It was a real thing.

UPDATE: David Corn has a complete timeline here on how Benghazi fever took hold of the GOP yet again this week.

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Yes, the "Innocence of Muslims" Video Really Did Play a Role in the Benghazi Attacks

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No, the New Benghazi Emails Don’t Demonstrate a White House Cover-Up

by MorganFalconer Posted on April 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wait a second. Is a National Review editor allowed to say this about Benghazi?

On the totality of the evidence we have so far, the White House took the intelligence community and diplomatic community’s estimate, which was relatively uncertain, bereft of much detail, and turned out days later to be quite wrong, and played up certain parts of it to avoid questions about their counterterror strategy and the situation in Libya. That isn’t being as straightforward with the American public as they could or probably should have been; it’s also not a lie or a cover-up.

This is a response to Charles Krauthammer’s bombastic insistence yesterday that newly released Benghazi emails had revealed “a classic cover-up of a cover-up.” But as Patrick Brennan says, they show no such thing.

You know, if conservatives had stuck to a reasonable line like this one in the first place, they could have caused President Obama a lot more damage. Did the White House “play up certain parts” of the Benghazi story in order to “avoid questions about their counterterror strategy”? I’d quibble over some of the details here, but that’s fair enough. And there are certainly legitimate questions—although they cut a bipartisan swath—about how security was handled in Libya before the attacks.

Stick to that stuff and you have a story that resonates—and not in a good way for Obama. Take the Krauthammer route, and you get cheers from the Fox News faithful but not much else. That’s why no one but a hard core of loons and fanatics cares about Benghazi anymore.

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No, the New Benghazi Emails Don’t Demonstrate a White House Cover-Up

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What Did We Learn from Abu Ghraib?

by HolleyJaynes Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It’s mind-boggling. Torture is still up for grabs in America. No one questions anymore whether the CIA waterboarded one individual 83 times or another 186 times. The basic facts are no longer in dispute either by those who champion torture or those who, like myself, despise the very idea of it. No one questions whether some individuals died being tortured in American custody. (They did.) No one questions that it was a national policy devised by those at the very highest levels of government. (It was.) But many, it seems, still believe that the torture policy, politely renamed in its heyday “the enhanced interrogation program,” was a good thing for the country.

Now, the nation awaits the newest chapter in the torture debate without having any idea whether it will close the book on American torture or open a path of pain and shame into the distant future. No one yet knows whether we will be allowed to awake from the nightmarish and unacceptable world of illegality and obfuscation into which torture and the network of offshore prisons, or “black sites,” plunged us all.

April 28th marks the tenth anniversary of the moment that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were made public in this country. On that day a decade ago, the TV news magazine “60 Minutes II” broadcast the first photographs from that American-run prison in “liberated” Iraq. They showed US military personnel humiliating, hurting, and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave a thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.

Thus began America’s public odyssey with torture, a story in many chapters and still missing an ending. As the Abu Ghraib anniversary nears and the White House, the CIA, and various senators still battle over the release of a summary of a 6,300-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Bush-era torture policies, it’s worth considering the strange journey we’ve taken and wondering just where we as a nation mired in the legacy of torture might be headed.

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What Did We Learn from Abu Ghraib?

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

by WinnieBachman Posted on April 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Bloomberg’s Michael Riley reported that the NSA was aware of the Heartbleed bug from nearly the day it was introduced:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said….Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

Henry Farrell explains just how bad this is here. But later in the day, the NSA denied everything:

“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report,” NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines told The Post. “Reports that say otherwise are wrong.”

The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence echoed that statement Friday, saying neither the NSA nor any other part of the U.S. government knew about Heartbleed before April 2014….The denials are unusually forceful for an agency that has historically deployed evasive language when referring to its intelligence programs.

You know, I’m honestly not sure which would be worse. That the NSA knew about this massive bug that threatened havoc for millions of Americans and did nothing about it for two years. Or that the NSA’s vaunted—and lavishly funded—cybersecurity team was completely in the dark about a gaping and highly-exploitable hole in the operational security of the internet for two years. It’s frankly hard to see any way the NSA comes out of this episode looking good.

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

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Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture

by Felipa6408 Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, kicked off a Washington kerfuffle with significant constitutional implications when she took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to accuse the CIA of spying on her committee’s investigation into its controversial interrogation and detention program. As pro-CIA partisans and the agency’s overseers on Capitol Hill squared off for a DC turf battle—with finger-pointing in both directions—lost in the hubbub was a basic and troubling fact: Feinstein had contended that this all began because, years ago, the spies of Langley had severely misled the legislators responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies.

At the start of her speech, Feinstein laid out the back story, and her account is a tale of a major CIA abuse. The CIA’s detention and interrogation (a.k.a. torture) program began in 2002. For its first four years, the CIA only told the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee about the program, keeping the rest of the panel in the dark. In September 2006, hours before President George W. Bush was to disclose the program to the public, then CIA Director Michael Hayden informed the rest of the committee. This piece of history shows the limits of congressional oversight. If only two members of the committee were informed, it meant that the panel could not provide full oversight of this program. But keeping secrets from legislators—even members of the intelligence committee—is not that unusual, and the story gets worse.

In December 2007, the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed two videotapes of the CIA’s interrogation (or torture) sessions. After this disclosure, Hayden told the Senate intelligence committee that eradicating the videos was not as worrisome as it seemed. According to Feinstein, he noted that CIA cables had detailed the interrogations and detention conditions and were “a more than adequate representation” of what had happened. He offered Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who was then chairing the committee, the opportunity to review these thousands of cables. Rockefeller dispatched two staffers to peruse these records.

It took the pair about a year to sift through all the material and produce a report for the intelligence committee. That report, Feinstein noted, was “chilling.” The review, she said, showed that the “interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us.”

That is, the CIA had misled the Capitol Hill watchdogs.

After reading the staff report, Feinstein, now chairing the committee, and Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), then the senior Republican on the committee, decided a far more expansive investigation was called for. On March 5, 2009, the committee voted 14 to 1 to initiate a full-fledged review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

It is that inquiry that has caused the recent fuss, with Feinstein claiming that the CIA (possibly illegally) penetrated computers used by committee investigators and removed documents indicating a CIA internal review of this program had concluded it was poorly managed, went too far, and did not produce decent intelligence. The committee’s more comprehensive review eventually produced a 6,300-page report slamming CIA that has yet to be made public, despite Feinstein pushing the CIA to declassify it.

So while this week’s focus is on whether the CIA improperly—or illegally—spied on the folks who have the constitutional obligation to monitor CIA actions in order to ensure the agency acts appropriately and within US law, Feinstein’s big reveal also presented a highly troubling charge: The CIA lied to Congress about what might be its most controversial program in decades. This in and of itself should be big news.

At the conclusion of her speech, Feinstein, referring to the present controversy, said, “How this will be resolved will show whether the intelligence committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.” That is true. And if there cannot be effective oversight of intelligence operations, then the foundation of the national security state is in question. Yet Feinstein’s remarks provide evidence that oversight was not working prior to the current face-off. If the CIA did not tell the Senate intelligence committee the truth about its interrogation and detention program, much more needs to be resolved than whether the spies hacked the gumshoes of Capitol Hill.

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Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture

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The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis

by KristinaRosenba Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

This morning, on C-SPAN, the foundation of the national security state exploded.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, took to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of spying on committee investigators tasked with probing the agency’s past use of harsh interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) and detention. Feinstein was responding to recent media stories reporting that the CIA had accessed computers used by intelligence committee staffers working on the committee’s investigation. The computers were set up by the CIA in a locked room in a secure facility separate from its headquarters, and CIA documents relevant to the inquiry were placed on these computers for the Senate investigators. But, it turns out, the Senate sleuths had also uncovered an internal CIA memo reviewing the interrogation program that had not been turned over by the agency. This document was far more critical of the interrogation program than the CIA’s official rebuttal to a still-classified, 6,300-page Senate intelligence committee report that slams it, and the CIA wanted to find out how the Senate investigators had gotten their mitts on this damaging memo.

The CIA’s infiltration of the Senate’s torture probe was a possible constitutional violation and perhaps a criminal one, too. The agency’s inspector general and the Justice Department have begun inquiries. And as the story recently broke, CIA sources—no names, please—told reporters that the real issue was whether the Senate investigators had hacked the CIA to obtain the internal review. Readers of the few newspaper stories on all this did not have to peer too far between the lines to discern a classic Washington battle was under way between Langley and Capitol Hill.

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The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis

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No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on March 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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From House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers:

Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close. They’ve been running circles around us.

This kind of knee-jerk reaction is unsurprising, but it’s also nuts. Has Rogers even been following events in Ukraine lately? The reason Putin has sent troops into Crimea is because everything he’s done over the past year has blown up in his face. This was a last-ditch effort to avoid a fool’s mate, not some deeply-calculated bit of geopolitical strategery.

Make no mistake. All the sanctions and NATO meetings and condemnations from foreign offices in the West won’t have much material effect on Putin’s immediate conduct. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about this stuff: he does, and he’s been bullying and blustering for a long time in a frantic effort to avoid it. Now, however, having failed utterly thanks to ham-handed tactics on his part, he’s finally decided on one last desperation move. Not because the West is helpless to retaliate, but because he’s simply decided he’s willing to bear the cost.1 It’s a sign of weakness, not a show of strength. It’s the price he’s paying for his inability to control events.

1This is why a strong response from the West is a good idea even though it won’t have much immediate effect. Having decided that he’s willing to pay the price for his action, Putin now has to be sent the bill. It will pay dividends down the road.

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No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

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The NSA’s Problems Go Beyond Just Its Phone Records Program

by DwainOquinn Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Eli Lake talks with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about the NSA’s massive collection of phone records:

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Clapper said the problems facing the U.S. intelligence community over its collection of phone records could have been avoided. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11—which is the genesis of the 215 program—and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards… We wouldn’t have had the problem we had,” Clapper said.

“What did us in here, what worked against us was this shocking revelation,” he said, referring to the first disclosures from Snowden. If the program had been publicly introduced in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, most Americans would probably have supported it. “I don’t think it would be of any greater concern to most Americans than fingerprints. Well people kind of accept that because they know about it. But had we been transparent about it and say here’s one more thing we have to do as citizens for the common good, just like we have to go to airports two hours early and take our shoes off, all the other things we do for the common good, this is one more thing.”

Two things. First, Clapper is quite possibly right. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Congress might well have approved DNA testing of everybody in the country if George Bush had proposed it. Hell, they approved the invasion of Iraq.

Second, though, Clapper is also wrong. I think he is, anyway. It wasn’t Snowden’s “shocking revelation” about the phone records program that did so much damage to the NSA. After all, we’ve known about that in fuzzy terms since 2005 and in very specific terms since Leslie Cauley reported it in 2006:

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

This provoked a bit of controversy at the time, but it faded away pretty quickly. It’s true that Snowden provided documentary evidence that had been missing in the earlier reports, but he didn’t really change what we knew. The sad fact is that the mere knowledge that the NSA was collecting an enormous database of every call made in the United States simply didn’t bother people very much when it was first revealed.

No, what hurt the NSA was Snowden’s revelations about everything it was doing. If it had just been phone records, interest might have died out quickly, just as it did in 2006. But it was far more than that, and that’s what’s kept this alive. Clapper is kidding himself if he thinks otherwise.

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The NSA’s Problems Go Beyond Just Its Phone Records Program

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6 Unanswered Questions About Obama’s Drone War

by CathleenZWLM Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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On January 23, 2009, President Barack Obama authorized his first drone strike. The attack, launched against a compound in northwestern Pakistan, killed between 7 and 15 people—but missed the Taliban hideout the Central Intelligence Agency thought it was targeting. Over the next five years, the CIA carried out more than 390 known drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. (The agency carried out 51 drone strikes between 2004 and 2009, during the Bush administration.)

Obama made a brief reference to the drone campaign in last week’s State of the Union address, assuring Congress that “I’ve imposed prudent limits on the use of drones.” This wasn’t the first time the president had acknowledged the need for a clear drone policy. Last May, Obama remarked at the National Defense University, “This new technology raises profound questions—about who is targeted, and why.” Yet the answers the administration has provided to these profound questions and the prudent limits it has put in place remain vague.

Here are six major questions about the US drone program that remain unanswered a decade after the first strike:

1. Who’s being targeted?
A declassified summary of the Presidential Policy Guidance states that “the policy of the United States is not to use lethal force when it is feasible to capture.” If capture is feasible, “lethal force will not be proposed or pursued as punishment or as a substitute for prosecuting a terrorist suspect in a civilian court or a military commission.” According to the Obama administration, lethal force can only be used against “Al Qaeda and its associated forces.” Yet as an investigation by McClatchy DC reported last year, the administration has not publicly identified any Al Qaeda-associated forces beyond the Afghan Taliban. McClatchy’s review of top secret US intelligence reports covering most drone strikes in Pakistan between 2006 and 2008 and between 2010 and 2011 showed that “drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence.” More than half of the 482 people killed between September 2010 and September 2011 were not senior Al Qaeda leaders but were “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani, or unknown extremists. Drones killed only six top Al Qaeda leaders in those months.

2. What constitutes an “imminent threat”?
The Presidential Policy Guidance outlines a number of conditions for the use of lethal force, including “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” According to an undated leaked Department of Justice white paper, defining a target as an “imminent threat” does not “require clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” The ongoing threat of Al Qaeda plots and attacks, the paper explains, “demands a broader concept of imminence.” The DOJ memo argues that the United States should be able “to act in self-defense in circumstances where there is evidence of further imminent attacks by terrorist groups even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack.” This broad legal definition of “imminent threat” appears to allow the Obama administration to strike at any time.

3. What about signature strikes?
Apart from a kill list of targets, a key feature of the drone war has been the use of signature strikes—presidentially-approved attacks on targets displaying a terrorist “signature,” such as “training camps and suspicious compounds.” The administration has refused to acknowledge the use of these signature strikes or discuss their legal justifications. The CIA does not disclose what criteria it uses to identify a terrorist signature. This particularly challenging to do in the northwest of Pakistan, where militants and civilians may dress alike, and where openly carrying weapons is customary.

4. Does Congress really know what’s going on?
The House and Senate intelligence committees oversee the drone program, however their ability to set limits is severely constrained because the program is classified. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Hill last February, “Right now it is very hard to oversee because it is regarded as a covert activity, so when you see something that is wrong and you ask to be able to address it, you are told no.” The administration has repeatedly denied requests for further information from lawmakers. For instance, since 2011, 21 requests by members of Congress to access Office of Legal Counsel memoranda that provide the legal basis for targeted killings have been denied. The White House also refused to provide witnesses representing the administration at recent Senate and House Judiciary Committee hearings on targeted killings.

5. How are civilian casualties avoided—and counted?
The Presidential Policy Guidance states that lethal strikes may be carried out only with “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed.” However, the Obama administration counts all military-age males killed by drones as militants. That explains why official counts of civilian deaths vary widely from independent counts. While in Sen. Feinstein stated last year that annual civilian casualties from drones fall in the “single digits”, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that total civilian casualties since 2004 in Pakistan alone have ranged from 416 to 951.

6. How does the administration justify the targeting of American citizens?
In September 2011, Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen. A secret Department of Justice memo provided the legal justification for targeting an American citizen. The memo, obtained by NBC News, found that it is lawful to use lethal force in a foreign country against an American citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al-Qaeda or an associated force if a high-level official has determined that the individual poses an imminent threat, capture is infeasible, and the operation would be consistent the laws of war.

The memo notes that assassinations of American citizens in this manner are justified as long as civilian casualties aren’t “excessive.” Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also an American, was killed in a separate strike two weeks later. When asked about the legal justification for his death, Obama advisor and former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki “should have (had) a far more responsible father.”

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6 Unanswered Questions About Obama’s Drone War

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Obama’s NSA Reforms More Transparent Than Expected—But Expectations Were Really Low

by HermelindaWCAQ Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, President Obama released his plan to reform the NSA’s sweeping surveillance program. Obama offered much praise for the NSA, and he’s not ending the agency’s controversial bulk collection program, which scoops up information about Americans’ telephone calls. But he is making substantial changes to how the program currently runs, indicating that he may be more willing to risk the ire of the intelligence community for the sake of transparency reforms, than he’s been in the past. Many oversight questions, though, are still being left to the intelligence community, and the reforms Obama announced on Friday only address a sliver of the surveillance issues raised by the Snowden leaks. Most notably, the president did not address many of the internet-related revelations produced by the Snowden documents. But he tried to offer some real reform to civil libertarians (though hardly meeting the demands for widespread changes) while providing much support to the intelligence community, which will not likely cheer the reforms the president is implementing.

Bulk Phone Records Collection: Not Going Away, But More Hurdles for the NSA

The biggest change announced on Friday deals with the government’s practice of sweeping up Americans’ phone records in bulk—a practice that 60 percent of Americans oppose. Privacy advocates had hoped that Obama would take this opportunity to end the program. Instead, he announced that he’ll be making some big changes to how it operates. He ordered the attorney general and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to implement a system in which NSA analysts must get approval from the FISA court to search the records. There will also be a new limit on the number of people the NSA can investigate via these records (“two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three.”) These are significant changes—ones that could ruffle feathers at the NSA, which has claimed that any changes to the program would undermine its ability to combat terrorism. However, the real test will be whether the judicial review process will be stringent enough to satisfy critics. In the past, the FISA court has been criticized as a “rubber stamp” court.

Bulk Phone Records Storage: Going Somewhere, No One Knows Where

Obama ordered the intelligence community and the attorney general to come up with a new way to store phone records collected under the program, without having the government hold on to this data. This certainly will create some hurdles for the NSA, but it doesn’t mean that the NSA is no longer permitted to collect telephone records. It’s just about how they’ll be stored. While the intelligence community has to come up with recommendations before March 28, it’s entirely unclear when this policy will be implemented, because no third-party outside of phone companies—which have indicated they don’t want this responsibility—really exists.

National Security Letters: Less Secret, Still No Judicial Oversight

Obama is making some modest changes to the process by which the government can use National Security Letters to compel businesses to secretly provide private records to federal investigators. Companies will now be able to disclose these requests—but at some yet-to-be determined point. The specifics are up to the attorney general. Privacy advocates will undoubtedly be disappointed by the fact that Obama is refusing to require judicial review before the government issues these secret orders.

The Top-Secret Spy Court: More Transparency, But Congress Should Figure It Out

Obama is asking the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to annually review which decisions made by the FISA court can be declassified. He is also asking Congress to put together a panel of advocates that will provide an independent voice in “significant cases before the court.” This is not quite as strong as having an in-house privacy advocate on every case, but it’s a serious change.

Everything else:

And…that’s pretty much it. Obama’s reforms don’t cover reports that the NSA has been working to undermine the internet’s encryption—such as by hacking into Google—and don’t entail a major overhaul of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which governs PRISM, the program that’s been accused of sweeping up internet communications. So it seems that any kind of online surveillance the government may be carrying out, will remain largely intact: “We’d hoped for, and the internet deserves, more,” says Alex Fowler, global privacy and policy leaderâ&#128;&#139; at Mozilla. “We’re concerned that the President didn’t address the most glaring reform needs.”

Obama maintains that there have been no alleged abuses of the telephone records collection program, which contradicts what the top-secret spy court has found. But his reforms indicate a greater willingness to reconsider aspects of the NSA’s surveillance programs, and they’ve somewhat exceeded expectations. He does say these reforms are only a start, which might be a small comfort to privacy advocates who are looking for much more.

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Obama’s NSA Reforms More Transparent Than Expected—But Expectations Were Really Low

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, ProPublica, Sprout, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama’s NSA Reforms More Transparent Than Expected—But Expectations Were Really Low