It really was just a few months ago that we were pointing out how ridiculous it was that some were calling for the arrest of Meet the Press' David Gregory for doing journalism. DC's attorney general chose not to go after Gregory, and you might think this would make David Gregory a bit more sensitive to the idea that doing journalism around reporting on the law and legal issues is different than doing a crime. But, on this week's Meet the Press, Gregory had on Glenn Greenwald, and towards the end of their initial Q&A (around the 9:30 mark), Gregory pretty directly suggests that Greenwald should be charged as well for "aiding and abetting" Ed Snowden.
The specific question (though, watching the video gives you much more of a sense of the tone and style in which it was asked) was:
"To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?"
After Greenwald hits back hard and points out the ridiculousness of a reporter "embracing" a theory that would outlaw nearly all investigative reporting on the government, Gregory insists he wasn't "endorsing" the idea, but merely raising the questions that others had. However, watching his initial question, it sure looks like he's directly suggesting that Greenwald committed a crime in reporting on such a huge story, making a huge leap in claiming that reporting on some leaked information is akin to "aiding and abetting."
Later in the show, Gregory's NBC colleague Chuck Todd made even stupider comments, suggesting -- based on nothing -- that Greenwald was more "involved" with Snowden than just as a reporter because Greenwald used to be a lawyer.
Of course, as Trevor Timm points out, during the interview, David Gregory himself repeated information that government officials leaked to him concerning a secret FISA court ruling (information that appears to be incorrect, based on the details that Snowden showed Greenwald, by the way). Given that, if Gregory believes that leaking classified information is a criminal act, then shouldn't Gregory be asking himself if he should be prosecuted?
One of the key refrains that has come out from those who are unhappy about the revelation of details around the NSA's surveillance efforts is that Edward Snowden's leaks are somehow harmful to America. During hearings about all of this, NSA boss Keith Alexander claimed that "Americans will die" because of these sorts of leaks. But... between those same hearings and other revelations from the administration and Congress, we're actually learning much more about the various programs directly from the government, as information is now being "declassified." And, apparently, President Obama is asking the NSA and the Justice Department to look into declassifying even more. So while the initial shove to declassify information may have come via Snowden, the stuff that we're really learning about is coming through revelations following Snowden's leaks -- revelations that never would have happened without his leaks.
So that raises a fairly basic question: if Snowden is somehow a traitor and putting lives at risk... why isn't the other information we're actually learning about the programs equally as problematic? The real answer seems to be that the information Snowden leaked does not harm us at all, but has simply revealed that the government has kept classified information from the American public that never should have been classified at all. The fact that only now are they looking to declassify it (and then doing so) shows pretty clearly that the information was improperly classified in the first place.
We recently had a video showing then Senator Joe Biden, from seven years ago, "debating" the current President Obama on government surveillance. I hadn't seen this until now, but someone else has put together a much better video showing Presidential candidate Obama in 2008 vs. President Obama in 2013. The difference is stark.
Not only is there a massive difference in what's being said, but also in how it's being said. The Candidate Obama spoke clearly, directly strongly and without equivocation about protecting civil liberties and not giving up our freedoms. President Obama's speech, on the other hand, sounds weak, vague and unpresidential in comparison. In the first one, he makes these clear, declarative announcements:
This administration puts forth a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.
But as President, he says (while rolling his eyes -- the video is incredible):
You can't have 100% security... and then also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience.... We're, we're going to have to make some choices.
As a candidate:
I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies the tools they need to take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedoms. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. That means no more national security letters to spy on Americans who are not suspected of committing a crime. No more tracking citizens who do no more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. That's not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.
As President, he talks vaguely about how his team made an "assessment" and that these programs keep people safe, and "in the abstract" people might claim these programs are "Big Brother" but he thinks there's a "balance" to be struck. It's funny how different dictatorial surveillance powers look when you're the guy in charge of them.
An early criticism of Snowden's leak about NSA spying activity was that the $20 million annual cost for PRISM -- whatever that turns out to be -- was simply too low to be credible. One person who knows more about storage costs than practically anyone -- well, outside the NSA, at least -- is Brewster Kahle, who set up the Internet Archive, essentially a backup for the entire Web plus a wonderfully rich store of many other materials. He's carried out a fascinating back-of-the envelope calculation of how much it would cost annually to record every phone call made in the US and store it in the cloud:
These estimates show only $27M in capital cost, and $2M in electricity and take less than 5,000 square feet of space to store and process all US phonecalls made in a year. The NSA seems to be spending $1.7 billion on a 100k square foot datacenter that could easily handle this and much much more. Therefore, money and technology would not hold back such a project -- it would be held back if someone did not have the opportunity or will.
Kahle has made the calculation available as a shared document (on Google, appropriately enough), so you can inspect his assumptions there and play around with the numbers. It's also worth reading through the comments to his short post, since they make some interesting points. However, even if the numbers are off by a factor or two, there's no doubt about the feasibility of recording all US phone calls.
And that's for sound files, which take up quite a lot of space. Text-based information pulled in from emails, Web pages and chat logs could be stored more compactly. That would make the routine recording of vast swathes of what those in the US -- and outside it -- do online not just plausible, but so cheap in comparison to the NSA's presumably large budget, that the latter might feel it would be crazy not to do so as a matter of course.
This isn't a huge surprise, but the Washington Post is reporting that US federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Edward Snowden charging him with espionage under the Espionage Act, along with theft and conversion of government property -- and have asked Hong Kong authorities to detain him. Just this morning, we were discussing the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers, prosecuting six different whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, twice the number of all other presidential administrations combined. Now we're up to number seven apparently. Update: The complaint has been unsealed (also embedded below).
Did Snowden break the law? Possibly -- but charging him with espionage is ridiculous, just as it has been ridiculous in many of these cases. Snowden wasn't doing this to "aid the enemy" but to alert the American public to the things that the administration itself had been publicly misleading to downright untruthful about. His actions have kicked off an important discussion and debate over surveillance society and how far it has gone today. That's not espionage. If he was doing espionage, he would have sold those secrets off to a foreign power and lived a nice life somewhere else. To charge him with espionage is insane.
In terms of process, the Washington Post explains:
By filing a criminal complaint, prosecutors have a legal basis to make the request of the authorities in Hong Kong. Prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment, probably also under seal, and can then move to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong for trial in the United States.
Snowden, however, can fight the U.S. effort to have him extradited in the courts in Hong Kong. Any court battle is likely to reach Hong Kong's highest court and could last many months, lawyers in the United States and Hong Kong said.
It also notes that while the US and Hong Kong have an extradition treaty, there is an exception for "political offenses."
While this certainly was not unexpected, it's still a disappointing move from the administration. The crackdown on whistleblowers does not make the US look strong. It makes our government look weak, petty and vindictive in the face of actual transparency. It's shameful.
Another day, another leak released from the Ed Snowden files. The latest: evidence that the UK's equivalent of the NSA is tapping into fiber optic cables to hoover up all sorts of internet data, similar to the NSA. The UK group, GCHQ, literally has called these program: "Mastering the Internet (MTI)" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation (GTE)." They're not much for nuance or code names across the pond, I guess. Apparently, they're collecting a ton of data:
By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA". (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)
And, GCHQ and the NSA are teaming up to go through it all:
By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.
But that's not all who have access to the data. The article claims 850,000 NSA employees and contractors with top secret clearance can access the GCHQ database. The report also notes that the UK spooks admit that they "have a light oversight regime compared with the US." Considering how light US oversight already is... In the US, there are those very weak minimization rules. In the UK, the analysts (including the American analysts working on the data) are told "it's your call."
The close releationship between GCHQ and the NSA is pretty clear. NSA boss Keith Alexander apparently visited the NSA's own Menwith Hill intercept station in the UK a few years ago and said: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith."
The details in the report suggest that the data collection here is on a fairly epic scale. When discussing revealing how many people have had their data scooped up under the program, GCHQ's lawyers apparently said "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage." Think about that for a second.
As for how GCHQ is tapping directly into fiber optic cables? Apparently, they keep that under much tighter wraps than they do the information they're collecting on everyone:
This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners".
The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned "sensitive relationship teams" and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of "special source" material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".
The source with knowledge of intelligence said on Friday the companies were obliged to co-operate in this operation. They are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables.
The tapping is done on transatlantic cables. If you want a sense of just who's likely to be playing along, why not check out this amazing interactive map of all 244 submarine cables around the globe. You can look up the names of the various cables to see who owns them, and you can pretty quickly get a fairly good sense of the companies who are likely "intercept partners." Here's a snippet...
Yet again, it appears that all the assurances that the NSA and the government have been giving us are not fully forthcoming about the extent of surveillance operations and what the NSA has access to. The NSA claims it gets rid of US persons from its own data, but says nothing about US persons' data collected by this data in the UK. And while the UK claims that it gets rid of UK data (though, with little oversight), assuming the NSA provides similar access back... that's all kind of meaningless, isn't it?
There's been plenty of commentary concerning the latest NSA leak concerning its FISA court-approved "rules" for when it can keep data, and when it needs to delete it. As many of you pointed out in the comments to that piece -- and many others are now exploring -- the rules seem to clearly say that if your data is encrypted, the NSA can keep it. Specifically, the minimization procedures say that the NSA has to destroy the communication it receives once it's determined as domestic unless they can demonstrate a few facts about it. As part of this, the rules note:
In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, maintenance of technical data bases requires retention of all communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis.
In other words, if your messages are encrypted, the NSA is keeping them until they can decrypt them. And, furthermore, as we noted earlier, the basic default is that if the NSA isn't sure about anything, it can keep your data. And, if it discovers anything at all remotely potentially criminal about your data, it can keep it, even if it didn't collect it for that purpose. As Kevin Bankston points out to Andy Greenberg in the link above:
The default is that your communications are unprotected.
That's the exact opposite of how it's supposed to be under the Constitution. The default is supposed to be that your communications are protected, and if the government wants to see it, it needs to go to court to get a specific warrant for that information.
Glenn Greenwald had promised that there were more incredible leaks concerning the NSA to come, and here's the first big one. Greenwald has revealed the NSA's rules that show the procedures for targeting non-US persons, and also how they "minimize" data collected on US persons when dealing with the "bulk" data records collection they do, such as with all of the data around every phone call made. These are two key parts to the NSA's insistence that they're staying within the law and not spying on people in the US. The details here, however, suggest a very different story. The FISA court has signed off on these rules that appear to grant incredibly wide latitude for the NSA to make use of data, rather than really "minimize" its usage. While President Obama and others have insisted that the rules make sure that the NSA really isn't collecting data on Americans, the reality shows that FISC approved rules let the NSA:
Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;
Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;
Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.
The report from Greenwald also reveals that orders he has seen from the FISA court concerning broad data collection do not appear to include details or explanations, other than your basic rubber stamp that FISC says it's okay.
One such warrant seen by the Guardian shows that they do not contain detailed legal rulings or explanation. Instead, the one-paragraph order, signed by a Fisa court judge in 2010, declares that the procedures submitted by the attorney general on behalf of the NSA are consistent with US law and the fourth amendment.
But since those procedures have now been leaked, we can see that they're not very carefully targeted at all. If the NSA doesn't know where someone is located, it can assume the person is foreign:
In the absence of specific information regarding whether a target is a United States person, a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person unless such person can be positively identified as a United States person.
That part about how the NSA can still keep data on US persons if they believe the data contains "evidence of a crime," "technical data base information" or "information pertaining to a threat of serious harm to life or property" obviously give the NSA incredible powers to -- contrary to what they've stated publicly -- retain all sorts of info on Americans.
Once we and others have had a chance to dig deeper through these, I'm sure we'll have more to say, but for now, it appears that, once again, the NSA and its defenders were less than fully forthcoming about how the NSA uses the data it collects and how it makes sure that Americans aren't targeted.
As NSA apologists in the government seek to defend the NSA surveillance program, they keep talking about how critical it was to stopping "more than 50" terrorist operations. However, every time they've described any, the details have shown that the surveillance programs often had little to do with uncovering the plot, and were clearly not a key component of stopping anything. We already discussed the NYC subway bombing plot, which was discovered through other means. The other story initially raised, concerning David Headly was similarly found to be on shaky ground as well.
At the hearings this week, FBI deputy director Sean Joyce claimed that the programs were helpful in stopping a plan to bomb the NY Stock Exchange, saying that the program helped find and capture the planners "in the very initial stages," implying that this was before any damage was done. When questioned just how "serious" the plot was, Joyce claimed: "I think the jury considered it serious, since they were all convicted." Ah, well, convictions are public and people went looking, and now it appears that this story is rapidly falling apart as well. The case in question was about Sabirhan Hasanoff and Wesam El-Hanafi, both of whom pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism. But nothing in the case had to do with bombing the stock exchange. The idea that the jury convicted them of such caught those involved in the case by surprise:
Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer for Mr. Hasanoff, called Mr. Joyce's portrayal "astonishing" because none of the defendants was charged with the stock exchange allegation and there was no jury trial in any of the cases.
And, now it's come out that the "threat" to the stock exchange never really existed. The people involved did explore the idea, but gave it up on their own well before doing any serious planning, and, of course, the charges against them had nothing to do with that. In other words, while these guys may have supported terrorism, they didn't have any actual plot to bomb the stock exchange, there was no risk, no lives were saved, and they were not convicted of any such plot. So, no, the programs didn't save any lives here either.
You'd think that the NSA and the FBI would be trotting out the good examples first. If this is the best they have...
Facing continued criticism over the NSA surveillance scandal, President Obama went on Charlie Rose's interview show for a "friendly" conversation in which Rose failed to really ask any serious followups on a whole variety of questions.
The interview starts out talking about a few other subjects, and then first mentions the NSA stuff as it relates to Chinese online attacks.
CHARLIE ROSE: Speaking of pushing back, what happened when you pushed back
on the question of hacking and serious allegations that come from this
country that believe that the Chinese are making serious strides and
hacking not only private sector but public sector?
BARACK OBAMA: We had a very blunt conversation about cyber security.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do they acknowledge it?
BARACK OBAMA: You know, when you’re having a conversation like this I
don’t think you ever expect a Chinese leader to say "You know what? You’re
right. You caught us red-handed."
CHARLIE ROSE: You got me. Yes.
BARACK OBAMA: We’re just stealing all your stuff and every day we try to
figure out how we can get into Apple --
This exchange is pretty silly, given that it now seems clear that the US is perhaps just as, if not more, aggressive in its proactive hacking programs against other countries. As for "getting into Apple," considering how much of Apple's actual manufacturing is done in China, it's not clear they really need to hack into the company, or that they would get much benefit from doing so. The two talk a bit more about that, and Obama reiterates the whole "China wants Apple's secrets" bits, insisting that's entirely unrelated to NSA stuff (even though it's clear that the NSA itself does similar economic espionage, raising questions about whether or not it's really all that unrelated). There's a bit of preamble, in which the President points out that before all of this happened he had obliquely hinted at revisiting our surveillance infrastructure before all this came out, and there's another random aside about the TSA, before they get to the point.
BARACK OBAMA: The way I view it -- my job is both to protect the American people and to
protect the American way of life which includes our privacy. And so every
program that we engage in, what I’ve said is let’s examine and make sure
that we’re making the right tradeoffs.
Now, with respect to the NSA, a government agency that has been in the
intelligence-gathering business for a very long time --
CHARLIE ROSE: Bigger and better than everybody else.
BARACK OBAMA: -- bigger and better than everybody else and we should take
pride in that because they’re extraordinary professionals. They’re
dedicated to keeping the American people safe. What I can say
unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person the NSA cannot listen to
your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails.
CHARLIE ROSE: And have not?
BARACK OBAMA: And have not. They can not and have not -- by law and by
rule. And unless they -- and usually it wouldn’t be they, it would be the
FBI -- go to a court and obtain a warrant and seek probable cause. The
same way it’s always been. The same way when we were growing up and we
were watching movies, you know, you wanted to go set up a wiretap, you’ve
got to go to a judge, show probable cause and then the judge --
CHARLIE ROSE: But have any of those been turned down? All the requests to
FISA courts, have they been turned down at all?
BARACK OBAMA: Let me finish here, Charlie, because I want to make sure --
this debate has gotten cloudy very quickly.
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly.
Way to ask those tough questions, Charlie. Yay! The NSA is "bigger and better!" Whoo!
BARACK OBAMA: So point number one: if you’re a U.S. person then NSA is not
listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your e-mails unless
it’s getting an individualized court order. That’s the existing rule.
There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden -- allegedly,
since there’s a criminal investigation taking place and that caused all the
ruckus. 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’s no content in that
database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how
long they took place. So that database is sitting there.
Now, if the NSA through some other sources -- maybe through the FBI, maybe
through a tip that went to the CIA, maybe through the NYPD -- gets a number
that -- where there’s a reasonable, articulable suspicion that this might
involve foreign terrorist activity related to al Qaeda and some other
international terrorist actors -- then what the NSA can do is it can query
that database to see does this number pop up. Did they make any other
calls? And if they did those calls will be spit out, a report will be
produced, it will be turned over to the FBI. At in no point is any content
revealed because there’s no content in the database.
CHARLIE ROSE: So I hear you saying I have no problem with what NSA has
been doing.
BARACK OBAMA: Well, let me finish, because I don’t. So what happens is
then the FBI -- if, in fact it now wants to get content, if, in fact, it
wants to start tapping that phone -- it’s got to go to the FISA court with
probable cause and ask for a warrant.
CHARLIE ROSE: But has FISA court turned down any request?
BARACK OBAMA: Because -- first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are
surprisingly small, number one. Number two -- folks don’t go with a query
unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.
None of that actually explains why this program is necessary. If there's a phone number that the NSA or the FBI gets that is of interest, then they should be able to get a warrant or a court order and request information on that number from the telcos. None of that means they should be able to hoover up everything.
Then we get to the "transparency" question.
CHARLIE ROSE: Should this be transparent in some way?
BARACK OBAMA: It is transparent, that’s why we set up the FISA court. The
whole point of my concern before I was president -- because some people say
well, Obama was this raving liberal before, now he’s Dick Cheney. Dick
Cheney sometimes says, "Yes, you know, he took it all, lock stock and
barrel." 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?
Checks and balances are not transparency. A secret court with a secret interpretation of the law for a secretive intelligence agency is not transparency.
So, on this telephone program you have a federal court with independent
federal judges overseeing the entire program and you’ve got Congress
overseeing the program. Not just the intelligence committee, not just the
judiciary committee but all of Congress had available to it before the last
reauthorization exactly how this program works.
And yet, many in Congress who were familiar with it, tried to speak out against it and were told by others that what they were saying wasn't true, and now many in Congress claimed they were unaware of the extent of the surveillance. Yes, some of the onus is on a failed Congress that deliberately chose to remain ignorant, but to argue that this is somehow either transparent or "oversight" is a complete and utter joke. So you'd assume that Charlie Rose, distinguished journalist, would point some of that out. But he doesn't. The President continues.
Now one last point I want to make because what you’ll hear is people say
"OK, we have no evidence that it has been abused so far," and they say
"Let’s even grant that Obama’s not abusing it. There are all these
processes, DOJ is examining it, it’s being audited, it’s being renewed
periodically, et cetera.
The very fact that there’s all this data in bulk it has enormous potential
for abuse because they’ll say, you know, "when you start look at metadata
even if you don’t know the names you can match it up. If there’s a call to
an oncologist and if there’s a call to a lawyer and you can pair that up
and figure out maybe this person is dying and they’re writing their will
and you can yield this information."
All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government under the
program right now to do that it would be illegal. We would not be allowed
to do that.
There are two issues here: first, the potential for abuse is very very real. Both the NSA and the FBI have a long history of being caught abusing surveillance capabilities. In just the past few years alone, the FBI has been shown regularly to have violated rules on surveillance with things like national security letters. So just saying "but that would be illegal" isn't particularly comforting.
The second, larger point, skipped over entirely by the President (and Rose) is whether or not this should be legal in the first place. The fact is that we have a secretive FISA court coming out with a secret interpretation of the law that very few people have seen. Ssome of those who have seen the interpretation say it contradicts the plain wording of the law that everyone sees. You can't just say "this is legal" and be done with it. There are significant questions about whether or not this interpretation really is legal -- and there's been no way to test it, because the secretive nature of the whole thing meant that no one could prove they had standing to challenge it, and then the government would try to get out of any lawsuit by claiming "national security" as an excuse.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what are you going to change? Are going to issue any
kind of instructions to the director of National Intelligence, Mr. Clapper,
and say "I want you to change it at least in this way"?
BARACK OBAMA: Here’s what we need to do. But before I say that -- and I
know that we’re running out of time but I want to make sure I get very
clear on this because there’s been a lot of misinformation out there.
There’s a second program called the 702 program. And what that does is
that does not apply to any U.S. person, has to be a foreign entity, it can
only be narrowly related to counterterrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber
hacking or attacks and a select number of identifiers, phone numbers, e-
mails, et cetera, those and the process has all been approved by the
courts, you can send to providers the Yahoos or the Googles and what have
you. And in the same way that you present essentially a warrant and what
will happen then is you there can obtain content but again that does not
apply to U.S. persons and it’s only in these very narrow bands.
So, you asked, what should we do?
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
BARACK OBAMA: What I’ve said is that what is a legitimate concern,
legitimate critique is that because these are classified programs, even
though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is
overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it, despite all that the
public may not fully know and that can make the public kind of nervous
right. Because they say, "Well, Obama says it’s OK or Congress says it’s
OK. I don’t know who this judge is, I’m nervous about it."
What I’ve asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we
can declassify without further compromising the program, number one. And
they’re in that process of doing so now. So that everything that I’m
describing to you today -- people, the public, newspapers, et cetera, can
look at because frankly people are making judgments just based on these
slides that have been leaked they’re not getting the complete story.
Number two, I’ve stood up a privacy and civil liberties oversight board
made up of independent citizens, including some fierce civil libertarians.
I’ll be meeting with them and what I want to do is to set up and structure
a national conversation not only about these two programs but also about
the general problem of these big data sets because this is not going to be
restricted to government entities.
So, in summary, he's asking the very people who have been keeping all this stuff secret all along, and claiming that any leak at all will kill Americans, to suddenly declassify some of it? Yeah, that'll work.
There's a little bit more after that about how the President "feels" to be compared to Bush/Cheney and a few other things, but nothing much of substance. None of it seems particularly reassuring other than "trust us, we're not as bad as you think we are" without ever acknowledging how frequently the government has abused those privileges in the past, and without recognizing that technology has enabled them to do significantly more surveillance today than ever before.
