Obama: If you are a US citizen the NSA can’t listen to your calls

- Edward Snowden

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...

This is not transparency. This is the regurgitation of obfuscating talking points.

Apart from that, I'm German, and every time I read this "not to US citizens" excuse, all I understand is that they'll happily rape all my data without any questions asked.

But isn't it a good thing we have the public with their smartphones recording the police as they work? Isn't it great that there are multiple separate, public, open channels to provide feedback when the police go astray?

The use of "cannot" here is very problematic.

EFF's position (from the CNET article): "The evidence shows that the NSA seeks a warrant only after the communication is initially acquired and analyzed by computers according to algorithms designed by humans, placed in a government database, and reviewed by an analyst."

Note that the president says "if you're a US person the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls" instead of saying "if you're a US person, the NSA isn't recording your phone calls".

The word "cannot" in this context means "they aren't supposed to", not "it is technically impossible".

He's saying that listening to your phone calls is "against the rules" but that doesn't mean this data isn't still being captured and put into an NSA data warehouse somewhere, in case circumstances change.

First, they use phrasing like "listen to calls" which is nonsensical in the modern world. If a computer observes all packets traveling across a fiber line, transcribes VoIP traffic into text, and then only persists counts of keywords to magnetic storage medium -- does that count as "listening"? If they do this proactively, but no human ever looks at those counts unless a warrant is pulled, does it count as listening? When we conduct the debate around outdated language, it is impossible to be specific about what is taking place.

Second, the government tends to regurgitate the law, rather than existing practice.

However, as my only other comment on the leaks indicates, I still think it's appalling that the infrastructure exists to 'passively' collect the content of U.S. citizens' online communication in the first place. From my experience working with 'big data', the step of collecting information is the difficult part. Mining the data is relatively trivial and can be 'switched on' at any point.

So my original concern still stands: there is no reason to assume that power won't be abused in the future. What happens when a terrorist threat born and bred in the U.S. successfully attacks a target? I'm willing to bet these statements about not actively monitoring U.S. citizens would quickly be forgotten and new rationalizations would be put into place instead -- e.g. the state only searches for key phrases in citizen generated content, like 'hate government'

Obama: "the NSA can't listen to your calls"

The denial I would like to hear: the NSA does not collect your e-mails, phone calls or internet traffic. The lack of a denial is looking very suspicious, and a careful reader is forced to act as if it's all being vacuumed up.

Their promises only relate to when that data may be used.

> I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.

I think there are actually quite a lot of people who do expressly argue that point in nearly those exact words. The point of contention is arguing we are demonstrably less free or more inconvenienced not because of the checkpoints per se, but because of the invasive procedures forced upon the public's expectations of privacy and the protection thereof.

This--invasive violation of public expectations of privacy & protection--is becoming a bit too much of a constant theme.

> [W]e don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. ... That's a false choice. ... To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom.

The President is an intelligent man with a solid grasp of language and its intricacies of usage. To admit there is a tradeoff is to implicitly assent to the sacrificing of freedom for said tradeoff (this, the achievement of security).

The bit about this being a false choice is interesting. The President invokes the fallacy of the false dilemma, which raises the expectation that there are additional options available--but not considered--where the goal of protecting freedoms and achieving greater security intersect ... and then does not offer any alternatives or exposition on what other options may be (or have been) considered. I'm left quite unsure of how he then considers sacrificing freedom to achieve security a false choice.

Moving on, this statement

> ... the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not.

directly contradicts the followup statement:

> ... if you’re a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your emails unless it’s getting an individualized court order.

This strikes as more talking points rearing their head without substantive difference in an effort to shape public opinion and discourse. If it is said that the NSA cannot target emails and listen to phone calls, that is going to etch itself into the public consciousness that the technological apparatus required is not present. But the follow up clarifies in nearly identical language that the NSA is not listening/targeting "unless it's getting an individualized court order." So now we are at the opposite side--the NSA can target your emails and listen to your phone calls, despite the aforementioned clarification they cannot. The talking points are keeping things intentionally muddled where they could easily make it more plain. So, barring other intricately worded explanations, this pretty much makes it sound like the NSA can indeed listen to your phone calls and target your emails, but only--as long as the existing rules are being followed--if they secure an "individualized court order" after good old-fashioned probable-cause seeking.

Of course, this is an even more bizarre clarification for the President to make when he later turns his attention to the phone records program. The 2015 Program:

> Program number one, called the 2015 Program, what that does is it gets data from the service providers like a Verizon in bulk, and basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names. There is no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place.

Okay, so admission that bulk call data is there, as Snowden alleged with his leaks. Once again, the talking points that this is all metadata--without explicitly using that particular word, though. And yet, it is trivial to connect a phone number to its owner. So, your call data is there in the database with all the information required to identify you specifically should intelligence agencies deem necessary.

The President further clarifies the nature of the reporting in that he says "[a]t no point is any content revealed", a perhaps unfortunate, unintended admission that the content is there. I know the President likes to be very clarifying when speaking and interviewing and somewhat sidetracks mid-sentence to clarify a specific phrase or term (note all the em-dashes littered throughout the text of the interview), but this one is particularly interesting because it reads as if he caught himself mid-un-truth when he jumps mid-sentence to say that if the FBI wants content, they then have to go to the FISC to ask for a warrant to get the content.

Any rational person should, therefore, conclude the content is indeed there to be interrogated, regardless of what the policy for such interrogation may be.

His comments on the 702 program are nigh-unintelligible for such a careful speaker as the President usually is. He tries to disqualify concerns about it by saying it "does not apply to any U.S. person", then describes it as a program that produces "essentially [but not actually] a warrant" that compels private companies who hold communications to turn over the content. Then again, the clarifier that this does not apply to U.S. persons and is only in "narrow bands" of criminal/terrorist activity by foreign agents. He further attempts to posit constitutionality and authority by saying "the process has all been approved by the courts"--but these are not publicly accountable courts whose decisions are made available to we the People.

> ... if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story.

Nevermind that we are only getting a partially complete story--being hidden behind curious clarifications and dubious assertions of state secrets privileges--because of leaked slides.

The big kicker:

> It is transparent. That’s why we set up the FISA court ... My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances?

So, on this telephone program, you’ve got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program. And you’ve got Congress overseeing the program, not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee — but all of Congress had available to it before the last reauthorization exactly how this program works.

This is more informative than most everything else in the interview. The President clarifies that--despite much of what campaign rhetoric made people believe he thought--his concern is not whether we should be enacting these intelligence gathering programs that target everyone and attempt to hide behind policy rules, not laws. His concern is the erection of checks and balances that appear good enough, but none of which actually are explicitly in the way of public discourse and notification.

He relies on a "federal court with independent federal judges" that operate in secret and whose decisions are de facto classified, as well as statistically shown to be rubber stamp decisions.

The biggest allegation is that all of Congress had this information available to them before the last reauthorization of the programs, information that told Congress "exactly how this program works".

Either the President is lying, or Congress is putting on a sham of shock when they were already aware of all of this, or the President is throwing them under the bus for not bothering to read and understand the information before reauthorizing--thus making a move to avert public outrage toward their representatives, all of whom allegedly had this information and ignored it when reauthorizing. Or something else.

I still feel like this interview offers a depressing amount of talking points winning over actual disclosure, and yet another advance of creatively assigning words like "transparency" to programs that are clearly not.

[edit: spelling/grammar mistakes. sorry]

In human-speak, "can't" means, "do they have a system capable of letting your average NSA analyst do this easily without oversight?" I suspect we'll never get the answer to this question unless it is leaked.

This is exactly the kind of thought I hoped the internet would break, and I have worked quite hard to help it happen, the day of the feuds are over, no more lords to came and lie to us telling that people who lives on the other side of that river want bad things to happen us, no more divide and conquer, the middle ages is over, is it?

Obama (2013): We don't spy on citizens

The President really has no credibility here - it's like asking a CEO if his company is engaged in illicit behavior - even if it is, it's his job to say it isn't (or that he isn't aware of it).

The constitution of one country is being used to govern an infrastructure that powers many more.