Obama Said to Outline Steps to Assure Public on Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Obama Said to Outline Steps to Assure Public on Surveillance

businessweek.com

6 pointsck25 comments

Bury it on a Friday afternoon. I do a lot of media / pr work, this is intentional.

It gives the administration the ability to have it in the headlines that "Obama is curbing NSA fears," without having enough people around to truly scrutinize his message.

Not trying to be a cynic, but they put out the declassified powerpoint slides a few weeks ago on a Friday, too. Not much scrutiny. Greenwald has been the one mostly pushing the story forward.

It's likely the only reason Obama's doing this at all is because his internal polling indicates that people are hitting the threshold of caring and he's trying to prevent the media from going too much further. Look at what the New Yorks Times editorial board said today, Obama wants to avoid more of those. He can weather Greenwald, but he needs the rest to fall in line.

He'll probably spin this as, "Bush authorized this stuff and I'm going to clean it up."

That's garbage, most of the practices were expanded under his watch.

I'm pissed and I voted for the guy twice. :-X

I voted for him too. Disappointed doesn't cover it. I know his speeches were rehearsed and all politicians just want that golden seat at the top, but i honestly thought he would follow through with a few more promises. I was actually shocked that he chose to openly back the NSA. I unvoted for him in my head that day.

Why were you shocked? He was opposed to the Iraq war, but it became clear very early on in his presidency and even during his original candidacy that his opposition was to that war specifically, and not based on some broader liberal foreign policy views. Tellingly, his response to "what would you have done?" was always "doubled-down on Afghanistan and hunted down Osama bin Laden." I distinctly remember him talking about this before he was elected, because I remember initially disliking him until I heard his strong foreign policy stance. Given that expectation, I can't say anything about his presidency (e.g. drone strikes) has surprised me (other than the general ineptitude of his DOJ--I expected a lawyer to have a better handle on that).

This was the closest article I could find on it.

Several news outlets are now hinting as of 2pm EDT there is going to be an announcement about surveillance reform.

He will appear around 3pm EDT (just under one hour from this post).

It's easier and saner to just ignore every defense the government has to say about surveillance. It's all lies and reading the media's wrapper around bullshit is time consuming.

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