
Obama Is Announcing His NSA Reforms Tomorrow - Use This Scorecard To Judge Them - thomasfromcdnjs
https://thedaywefightback.org/obama-scorecard/
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kdragon
The NSA very likely have secret information to blackmail President Obama and
other important political figures. Daniel Ellsberg agrees with this sentiment
(which he mentions in his recent reddit AMA), and Russell Tice confirmed this
possibility when becoming an NSA whistleblower in 2006:

"On June 19, 2013, Tice claimed while being interviewed that the NSA had spied
on Barack Obama while he was a senator, along with monitoring federal judges,
ranking military officials, and other members of Congress, saying he himself
had seen and held papers ordering such actions.[12][13] He went on to say,
"This thing is incredible what NSA has done. They've basically turned
themselves—in my opinion—into a rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover
capabilities on a monstrous scale on steroids"."

Remember, this has already happened very recently in our nation's history,
during J. Edgar Hoover's direction of the FBI:

"Hoover became a controversial figure, as evidence of his secretive actions
became known. His critics have accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of
the FBI.[1] He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to
amass secret files on political leaders,[2] and to collect evidence using
illegal methods.[3] Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was
in a position to intimidate and threaten sitting Presidents.[4]"

This part of american history needs to be shouted from the mountain tops. "The
Burglary" and COINTELPRO need to be mandatory teaching subjects in our
schools. It's not a conspiracy theory to suspect NSA of controlling politics
and activism through blackmail and coercion. This is exactly what has happened
before with Hoover's FBI, and there's every reason to believe this is
happening again with the NSA.

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ihsw
> there's every reason to believe this is happening again with the NSA

No, there isn't -- there is no such evidence that our elected officials are
being coerced by the NSA.

Let me say it again, if such proof is revealed then it would be absolutely
terrifying for everybody involved and all over the news (be it MSM or social
or whatever). As it stands now there are only claims, and there is a distinct
lack of evidence and facts surrounding such claims.

Now, with regards to blackmailing our elected officials, I think we can put it
simply as such: the fear of _just the possibility_ that we might be
blackmailed is enough to cause self-censorship. This is a historical truth and
accepted as self-evident.

That said, our elected officials are no less victims than we are. They are
spied on as much as -- if not more than -- us.

Please acknowledge this one thing, if you will acknowledge anything in my
post: _our elected officials are no less victims than we are._

~~~
daeken
> Please acknowledge this one thing, if you will acknowledge anything in my
> post: our elected officials are no less victims than we are.

If I hire someone to walk around a room punching everyone in the face, my nose
may be broken, but I'm not a victim in any real sense. These officials made
their choice and it came back to bite them in the ass.

~~~
sp332
ihsw meant the _other_ elected officials.

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Dirlewanger
Wow. People just cannot let go of Obama. It's pathetic that people STILL are
willing to forgive him, thinking he'll somehow change, that he's somehow
better and will rise above this endlessly expanding government of ours and
take a stand with reform. Let the fuck go of it.

And sharing memes on Facebook? What the fuck is that going to do?

~~~
d23
Let's just see how it turns out by the end of all of this. Remember, people
said the same thing with DADT: "why not just end this? why not issue an
executive order?" Because he was playing the long game and ended up getting a
permanent repeal.

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Shivetya
he wasn't playing the long game, he is playing the same game now as then,
politics. All his actions are weighed against the affect on the next election.
There is no other concern with him or the others in power.

Promises made before elections are just phrases used to put the other side off
balance or force the other side to react. They are never really meant to be
acted upon if there is any political cost.

Playing the long game, nah just waiting out inevitability, as in it wasn't
going to stand anyway and he had that luxury to rely on

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ck2
Well Gitmo was ordered closed. So it's gone right? Oh yeah.

Announce all you want, it will still be there tomorrow.

~~~
JPKab
While I'm the first to admit that Obama is lacking in political courage (he
generally just sticks his finger in the air to see which way the wind is
blowing, like he did with gay marriage), Gitmo isn't his fault. We can thank
the cowardly Congress for that. "Rep. Dumbshit voted to close Gitmo!! Dumbshit
loves the terrorists!!! This November, vote Jim Douchenozzle for Congress,
because Douchenozzle hates the terrorists."

The ignorance and overall un-literacy (not illiterate, unliterate, meaning
they're too fucking lazy to read) of the American public, and the high turnout
ratio of elderly, and I'm sorry to say, gullible senior citizens doesn't help.

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freehunter
Personally I don't see the problem with a politician figuring out what their
constituents want and doing just that. I hear criticisms of weak politicians
just doing whatever seems favorable... isn't that what they're there for? To
represent the will of the people?

I don't want to elect someone who will force their ideas into law. I want to
elect someone who will force _the people 's_ ideas into law. What's wrong with
a politician saying "I had this idea, but I changed my mind because the people
told me I was wrong"?

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pessimizer
>I want to elect someone who will force the people's ideas into law.

What about when the people choose an ethnic group that they want to lynch en
masse, or a particular type of music that they want to make it a crime to
distribute, or to start a mass extermination of sharks in coastal waters, or
to have the EPA offices torn down and replaced with a massive monument to the
10 commandments?

~~~
hga
Yeah, but I don't think freehunter was invoking white line unConstitutional
things, which cover your first two items.

The latter two are just reflections on shifting cultural trends. E.g. replace
sharks with wolves for the first ... but the latter is cute. Thou shall not
covet thy neighbor's wetlands....

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rayiner
A lot of these are either politically impossible or not within the President's
power to implement to begin with:

2) Protect "privacy rights" of foreigners: Foreigners don't have privacy
rights under our Constitution, and by and large Americans don't have a problem
with the NSA spying on foreigners. Indeed, that's the purpose of the NSA.

5) Stop undermining internet security: what does this even mean? Should the
NSA stop figuring out how to break encryption? Stop inserting backdoors into
equipment sold to China? Again, that's the purpose of the NSA.

7) Reject the third party doctrine: the third party doctrine is a legal
doctrine; the President cannot reject it, only the Supreme Court.

It's a mistake to believe that just because many Americans are upset with the
NSA over recent revelations, that they embrace the leftist/globalist
sentiments that are common in the tech community with regards to the NSA. To
the extent the public opposes the NSA programs, they oppose mass-collection of
call data from Americans. That's it.

~~~
tptacek
There's a widely held belief that the way NSA stockpiles exploits harms
Internet security. One plausible way that could be true is if NSA sources
exploits from researchers who would otherwise sell them to places that would
disclose them to vendors, which NSA won't do.

And, obviously, there's the widely held (and very plausible) belief that NSA
backdoored random number generator standards. Those backdoors probably aren't
currently doing much harm to the Internet, because they aren't in use on
systems whose random numbers we (a) care much about and (b) are exposed 32
bytes at a time. But still, it's reasonable to expect NSA to stop doing that
kind of thing.

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rayiner
I don't think those sorts of reforms are unreasonable, and go to the general
issue of cabining the scope of the NSA to foreign instead of domestic
surveillance. However, I think they're probably too esoteric for a political
solution. I'd imagine this is just something the standards bodies will have to
deal with.

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JoeAltmaier
The NSA's foreign activity is very much a part of the problem. American
interests are damaged for the forseeable future because of revelations about
their corruption of the internet, of hardware shipped overseas, of cable
traffic, and on and on.

~~~
tptacek
That kind of thinking is the product of availability bias: you think about
NSA's foreign activity, because it's been leaked en masse. But it would be
incredibly naive to think that major European countries --- not just the UK,
but particularly France and Germany --- haven't been doing the exact same
things for years. When we get to talking about "foreign intelligence", we are
talking about pure SIGINT, of the sort that has been practiced since before
the computer era --- in fact, the sort of SIGINT that presaged and motivated
the computer era to begin with.

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JoeAltmaier
Really? Can anyone argue that what the NSA is doing resembles anything that
ever went before? Using (subverting) the entire power of the internet and its
major commercial inventors/backbone to capture petabytes of personal data on
everyone everywhere?

Since our European friends have lesser resources, I cannot imagine they have
done/would even conceive of doing anything so cold-blooded as our NSA has
done. Which internet authorities are centered in Germany? Any?

In fact, I imagine a new Internet rule will have to be created, where invoking
the NSA as hyperbole ends a thread in much the same way as NAZIs or Hitler do
now.

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tptacek
One could argue that if one wanted to move the goalposts back to pretend that
one was arguing with a point that nobody disagrees with. My understanding is
that you were talking about foreign signals intelligence, and that was what I
was commenting on.

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protomyth
After all these years, I only value the legislation a politician introduces,
official actions in office, and their votes. Everything else is too hard to
figure out the intent or sincerity.

This might be from having politicians in the 90's lie to my face and then vote
totally different.

~~~
hga
And you've got to be careful with those votes.

E.g. the common Senate trick of voting for cloture, that is, the end of modern
version of the filibuster which needs 60 votes (not that that is likely to
survive very long now that the "nuclear option" has been launched) and then
voting against the bill. That gives 9-10 Senators room for posturing, and
underlines how you need to learn some of each house's procedures to know
what's really going on.

Not all that much, that plus paying attention to a few bills you consider
telling, and a little search fu on thomas.gov the day after a vote goes a long
way.

ADDED: For the House, you need to learn, generally from other sources, the
rules under which a bill was brought to the floor and the associated votes.
Whatever you knew about the Senate is now subject to abrupt change: among
other things, the nuclear option was launched with a majority vote of the
Senators, and the sources I've been reading say a rules change by majority
vote was either unprecedented or not done for more than a century.

Senate Majority Leader Reid has also _de facto_ changed rules like the ability
to offer amendments (the words of art are "filling the amendment tree"), and
has recently? formally stated that right is over.

Lord knows what's going to happen when the Republicans regain control of the
Senate someday; even the "why can't we all be friends?" Republican Senate old
bulls are very unhappy about these changes.

~~~
protomyth
Yep, or the voting against a bill you like in the Senate so you can bring it
up again.

It saddens me that reporters don't explain the rules to people. The
misreporting on what a vote means and why some voted Yeah to one vote and Nay
to another really bugs me. Certain news outlets have actually lied about what
was going on.

It is a bit hard to follow. Locally, one ND reporter followed the ND session
on twitter and did a remarkably good job including explaining the reasons for
the 1 vote in a 99-1 vote that looked correct but could have been horribly
(and maliciously) misreported.

[edit] as to the "nuclear option" \- very short-sited and makes one see that
Pres. Clinton was a much better manager of the executive branch.

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cmiles74
I don't think we're going to here anything substantial from the President.
Regardless, providing people with a list of the issues and an easy way to keep
track of how we does (or more likely, doesn't) address them sounds like a good
idea to me.

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hajderr
This guy makes me so angry. I will never believe anything he says. Also, he
has a greater strategy, and doing occasional flirting is not gonna make me
trust him.

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cincinnatus
The problems that led to this failure of the system are cultural not
procedural. We already have the constitution and many laws and procedure that
should have prevented what has been going on. What we have is a profound lack
of understanding of how intelligence works and the limits of what can be done
with it, intentionally or not.

You can't fix culture. You can only shut it down and start over. And that will
not happen.

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mcphilip
And now for the dog and pony show wherein politicians will compete to "always
make use of a good crisis", jockeying for position to see who wins the most
political capital by creating the harshest sounding reprimand of the NSA with
the least actual consequences.

I fully expect the NSA reform to make even the financial reform look harsh in
comparison.

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esbranson
> 4\. National Security Letters need prior judicial review and should never be
> accompanied by a perpetual gag order.

See also 18 USC 2705(b):

> A governmental entity acting under [18 USC 2703(d)] [...] may apply to a
> court for an order commanding a provider of electronic communications
> service or remote computing service to whom a warrant, subpoena, or court
> order is directed, for such period as the court deems appropriate, not to
> notify any other person of the existence of the warrant, subpoena, or court
> order.

Note that 18 USC 2703 and 18 USC 2705 were part of the Electronic
Communications _Privacy_ Act of 1986.

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nfoz
I wish we could add: "Pardon Snowden"

But I suppose that's in the realm of fantasy?

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chewxy
I'm not optimistic :S

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mschuster91
Uh, does anyone have this in cleartext form? I'm on a EDGE connection and it
looks like the darn thing is all-images.

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sp332
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fthedaywefightback.org%2Fobama-
scorecard%2F)

The text on the scorecard picture is repeated below it in plain text, plus
commentary.

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ye
2 out 12 would be lucky.

