14 DAY TRIAL // During his speech on Friday, Barack Obama addressed several issues regarding the NSA’s widespread surveillance practices, including the collection of US citizens’ metadata.
The discourse helped ease some concerns, but most of those who have followed the NSA scandal for the past seven months have picked up on all the things that were missing from the long-awaited reforms list.
Basically, since the revelations list is so long, everyone was expecting to have at least a few more reforms, not to just take away the metadata trove from the NSA and have the agency get a court order (from a secret court) to get access to information.
One of the important issues that Obama should have addressed is the bulk collection of Internet metadata, which is based on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. Another important element that was just revealed is the growing collection of millions of text messages and contact lists that the NSA is also gathering.
Perhaps one of the most shocking revelations of the past seven months regarded NSA’s efforts to undermine encryption standards by pushing companies to build backdoors into their codes. Many voices have called for the Obama administration to put a stop to these practices and even the White House panel put in charge of reviewing the NSA’s activities said that the agency should not, in any way, subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable generally available commercial software.
Furthermore, revelations based on Snowden’s leaked files, such as the fact that the NSA is spying on American companies’ data centers around the world, weren’t addressed.
Both in the case of weakening encryption and in the data center’s breach, companies such as Google and Yahoo have taken steps to strengthen security, making sure to publicly criticize the intelligence agency.
Something else that Barack Obama didn’t address was the naming of a public advocate at the FISA court, the secret court that’s so far played the role of rubber stamp for the National Security Agency. A panel of experts will, however, participate in the meetings, but they won’t intervene in any case.
All in all, the list of issues that were mentioned by Obama in his speech is much too short. The number of reforms that the NSA must go through is obviously much larger than what the US government is willing to apply.