Will the US End Its Global Espionage?

Did hacker Edward Snowden plan on ruining Barack Obama’s vacation like he had ruined Obama’s start to the summer? The U.S. president, who flew to the posh island of Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday, should fear the young programmer. Snowden left the National Security Agency (NSA) and today became a refugee in Russia, making new revelations about the American spy program.

Glenn Greenwald, [the American who reported the Snowden story in the U.K.’s The Guardian,] is a former lawyer turned reporter who promised the release of unedited documents that would again prove the extent of American authority on a national and international scale. If these threats were carried out, the course of action Obama announced at his press conference on Friday would appear very inadequate. Already, just several hours after his speech, many observers doubt how revolutionary the impact of the White House’s envisaged measures would be.

However, Barack Obama has promised “greater transparency” and “greater oversight” and pledged to better respect the liberties of his citizens and of Internet users around the world. “I want to make clear once again that America is not interested in spying on ordinary people,” he said. This was before announcing a reform of the Patriot Act, a legislative security arsenal voted into effect directly after Sept. 11, which justifies the collection of phone metadata records by the NSA, the powerful agency in charge of electronic interceptions.

The Fundamentals Are Not Changing

The American president also discussed the reinforcement of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court with 11 judges who authorized the NSA to gather telephone and Internet user data. Another issue mentioned was the declassification of a certain amount of information on the NSA surveillance programs. Finally, the agency is to appoint a person in charge of privacy and civil liberties.

Are these announcements really true? “It is a crucial first step toward a democratic dialogue,” said an association for defending civil liberties on the Internet. The ACLU was more severe, suggesting that these propositions were “too little, too late.” The New York Times was even less compromising: “The collection of data will continue for years, gather more and more information than is necessary to combat terrorism …. Though the NSA believes in its need to collect phone data, none of these promises made in order to keep them within the boundaries of the law represent any sort of progress.”*

Ten days ago, the head of the NSA spoke in the opposite direction. While assuring Americans that his agency would not interfere with their privacy, he justified the collection of data as being indispensable for identifying potential terrorists. Gen. Keith Alexander also assumed the secret nature of his work: “If I told everyone what we do, our enemies would know how to break through our defenses.” This is another way of saying that the fundamentals of information collection are not changing.

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.