NEW YORK TIMES Editorial: …The president’s most significant announcement was also the hardest to parse. He ordered “a transition that will end” the bulk collection of phone metadata as it currently exists, but what exactly will end? The database will still exist, even if he said he wants it held outside the government. Mr. Obama should have called for sharp reductions in the amount of data the government collects, or at least adopted his own review panel’s recommendation that telecommunications companies keep the data they create and let the National Security Agency request only what it needs. Instead, he gave the Justice Department and intelligence officials until late March to come up with alternate storage options, seeking a new answer when the best ones are already obvious.
But he added two restrictions that could significantly reduce the possibility of abuse of this information: Wherever the database resides, he said, it may be queried only “after a judicial finding or in the case of a true emergency.” (That calls for a clear definition of “emergency.”) Agency analysts will be permitted to pursue phone calls that are two “hops” removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization, instead of three. That extra hop allowed for the examination of an exponentially larger number of phone calls
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Mr. Obama did not address the bigger problem that the collection of all this data, no matter who ends up holding onto it, may not be making us any safer. That was the conclusion of the president’s review panel as well as afederal judge in Washington who ruled that the bulk-collection program was probably unconstitutional and an extensive report by the New America Foundation finding that the program “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity.”… (more)
NEWSLANC: We have confidence in this president. But what about a future one? Moreover recent revelations indicate that the President is not necessarily in charge, with the military ignoring instructions. Don’t think citizen’s guns will protect us because they would be useless. Information collection on the citizenry is where the rubber meets the road.
When I was a teenager the Cuban Missile crisis came upon us. I didn’t fully understand what it meant but I knew it wasn’t good. In later years, as details emerged, we discovered how close we approached a nuclear war. It was reported that Nikita Khrushchev became very scared when he discovered how little control he had over the military once it was engaged. Nikita did not hold the nuclear trigger, someone else did.
Whether you trust Mr. Obama or not, ultimately in this matter he is not in charge. Let us not pretend that he is. Somehow this internal spying must be ended; and this goes for the internet companies too.