Obama’s proposal addressing domestic surveillance concerns won’t do much
Last Friday President Obama held a news conference addressing domestic surveillance, an issue in which has become a significant in light of the revelations uncovered in the infamous NSA information leaks perpetrated by Edward Snowden. Though the more reported takeaway from the conference was that Obama said Snowden was not a patriot for his actions, Obama also outlined a four step plan to replace confidence in American surveillance, both foreign and domestic. While that first premise is in itself is debatable, it is clear that Obama’s proposed steps are insufficient.
In essence, Obama promised to work with Congress to examine section 215 of the Patriot Act, to further reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to make his administration more transparent to the American people by having an outside group examine the administration’s surveillance practices and propose improvements. While all of this sounds very good, it will not actually help much with protecting the privacy of the American people.
There is a glaring issue with the first of Obama’s proposed reforms. He mentions specifically section 215 of the Patriot Act, which does in fact deal with telephonic surveillance, but is not the provision that allows for random surveillance. Section 702 makes it possible for “back-door” searches on private phone records without a warrant, and also features broad authorizations for intercepting actual phone calls that could easily be exploited. So Obama and Congress can fiddle with section 215 all they want, it will do nothing to close the easily abused loopholes that should be of concern to the American people.
The second point is no more helpful. Most U.S. citizens have absolutely no clue what the FISC is, much less how it works and the very influential renderings it bestows. FISC, regardless of whether or not through intentional obfuscation, remains mostly secretive. All of its member judges are hand selected by Chief Justice John Roberts, who, while not officially partisan, has clear partisan opinions and affiliations.
The court, charged with reviewing requests for domestic surveillance from a myriad of governmental agencies, is much too important to be completely decided by one partisan-influenced, unelected official. Obama stated that he would ensure that the voice of civil liberties gets heard in the decision making process, and while that is an important start, there is much left to do to completely restore confidence in the FISC.
Obama’s third proposal to increase transparency within his administration which deals with surveillance. This is too another promise that sounds really good in theory, but the practical application is much less cut and dry. There have been plenty of promises of transparency and Obama has done better than a lot of other politicians but I am skeptical that any serious reforms will be made. The very nature of national surveillance is that it is much more effective when done in secret, and given the importance of security, no one is arguing that all surveillance should be mad public and done with the full consent of the American people. But if I can’t know what intelligence agencies are doing I want to ensure that they are not able to trample civil liberties in pursuit of information, as they currently can.
Some argue that defeating terrorism is a bigger priority than minor infringements that will never effect our personal lives. But while security from external forces is important, so is protection from internal injustice. Domestic spying could violate the privacy of innocent citizens and this undermines an essential part of our democracy. And there is no shortage of examples of the government abusing it’s power to target citizens such as the FBI’s defunct COINTELPRO program. It used a myriad of illegal tactics and surveillance to attempt to disrupt social movements in the late 60’s and early 70’s and was not even publicly acknowledged until it’s existence was leaked by an activist group. It is true that most programs like that happened in a different era before mass media activity, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen again.
The right to privacy and private communication are essential to our democracy. While the war on terror still rages on, so are security measures that keep us safe from terrorists. But there must be real reform on the extent of those measures to ensure that citizens are protected from domestic threats as well as those abroad.
The fact is sectors of the intelligence community can and have collected outright illegal information on their own citizens and misused it. Unfortunately, despite the President’s rhetoric this isn’t likely to change.