Obama Is Weakening National Security the Way He Devastated Health Care

President Barack Obama's orders to change US surveillance practices carried out by the National Security Agency under legislation passed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack have put the burden on Congress to deal with the national security controversy that has angered Americans and outraged foreign allies. Characteristically, President Obama avoided offering his own detailed proposals for major action on the practice of sweeping up billions of phone, email and text messages from across the globe. Instead, the President made broad suggestions and left the concrete actions to be worked out by Congress and the Department of Justice. He said the NSA program has worked well to keep America secure, but he added, rather illogically, that it now needs new limits on the way intelligence officials access phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans. The President suggested that he is moving toward eventually stripping the massive data collection from the government's hands, an idea strongly rejected by private internet and communications providers who say that the shift would require standardized collection and storage protocols that do not exist today if the data is to be searchable across providers. Their objections also include the cost of storing data indefinitely - it is now destroyed in one to two years up to ten years - and their demand for new legislation to require them to collect and store records for the government and to protect them from customer lawsuits if their data is eventually searched. Telephone executives also warn that building new technical infrastructure and adding staff to contend with records demands would cost far more than the $60 million federal estimate. There are also issues being raised by legal experts about the President's idea to hire a private business or create a new independent entity to store and oversee NSA phone records. It is not clear whether the government could easily do either. Hiring an outside private firm might continue public mistrust, in light of recent widespread hacking into Target and other companies, experts said. Choosing a private contractor could backfire if the process recreates the chaos of the government's health care website. And relying on a quasi-government agency might reduce even more public confidence, the factor at the heart of the effort to change NSA operations. Constitutional analysts also question the legal basis for Obama's commitment to form an advisory panel of privacy experts to intervene in some proceedings of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the NSA's data mining operations. Obama has asked Congress to set up such a panel, but senior federal judges already oppose the move, citing practical and legal problems. Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said : "I think we're going to see pretty quickly the lack of specificity behind some of the president's promises." Judges question how the office of the public advocate would be managed and also raise constitutional issues about whom the advocates would represent and how they would obtain secret clearances to look at some of the government's most sensitive classified documents. The notion received severe criticism from the federal judiciary. US District Judge John D. Bates, the administrative judge of the US court system and previously chief judge of the FISA court, said any outside advocate group could not effectively provide the court with independent factual investigations necessary for highly classified national security cases or create a truly adversarial process. And Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday that putting an uninformed outside advocate between the FISA court and an intelligence professional seeking a warrant to search NSA metadata would only slow down the process and make it likely that the judge would continue to rely on the intelligence pro. On the other side of the spectrum, privacy advocates called Obama's proposal a shell game - assigning the collection to a new, as yet undecided entity instead of ending it outright. They had even sharper criticism for the speech's minimal focus on the NSA intercepts of billions of overseas Internet messages and phone conversations from foreigners each day. The program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allows the US government to read or listen to foreign messages and phone calls as long as they do not target American citizens who live overseas. But Obama did not spell out how or when any of his suggested changes would occur. Nor did Obama specify any sweeping changes to the so-called 702 program to protect foreigners' privacy, although he did broadly promise to order "the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas." He said that would include limiting the time that the US holds the foreign information it collects and restricting its use. Given the mass of foreign communications surveillance, the President offered just a "sliver" of respite from fears of US spying, according to Matt Simons, director of social and economic justice at Chicago-based software company ThoughtWorks, just one of a number of US tech firms seeking broad reforms to prevent clients from defecting to foreign firms that might offer more protection. And at a Brookings Institution forum after the Obama speech, intelligence experts debated the effects of Obama's orders on privacy, security and commerce. While the collection of Americans' phone records "is the molten core of the political debate," the surveillance of foreigners' communications is at the heart of NSA operations, senior fellow Benjamin Wittes said. He believes that massive changes likely will not be needed, because US intelligence officials generally don't eavesdrop on or read foreign communications they don't need. He called Obama's pledge to protect foreigners' privacy rights a significant step toward rebuilding US trust overseas, calling it a spiritual step that does not necessarily need to be followed by deeds. And finally, there is Congress itself. Obama has made it almost impossible for a reluctant Congress to avoid making some changes in the US phone surveillance it has supported for years. The decisions to be made are between how to protect privacy rights and how to protect the US from terror attacks - what officials have called the main purpose of the NSA programs. "We have to get it right, and that is not simple," Obama said. The President said his proposals "should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies maintain the tools they need to keep us safe." Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Rogers, who are chairmen of the congressional Intelligence Committees, said in a rebuff to the President : "We encourage the White House to send legislation with the president's proposed changes to Congress so they can be fully debated." ~~~~~ Dear readers, this is a complex set of issues and President Obama has not provided clarity. He has simply scrambled the existing NSA metadata sweep programs without giving any detailed replacement scenario beyond his familiar platitudes. As former NSA director Michael Haydn put it in a Newsmax interview : "The president made it very clear: We are doing this to give people more confidence that the metadata will not be abused in the future. 'Now, what's the price to pay by making these changes to give people more confidence about the future?' Hayden asked. 'What might we be giving up? This is all about making people more comfortable, so here’s the deal,' he concluded. 'You're going to be a lot more comfortable. You're going to be a lot less safe, but you’re going to be more comfortable.' " It is distressing to realize that America is trading security for comfort, if that is true, dear readers. To regress to a pre-9/11 surveillance position, as some have suggested Obama's new position will cause, at the very least deserves informed decisions by Congress and a real understanding of the tradeoffs by the American people. Today we have neither. But that is how Mr. Obama's presidency operates, isn't it.