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Leighton Woodhouse | Reader Supported News | August 11, 2013
Yesterday, President Obama repeated what has become a familiar routine: after two months of bad press on a controversial issue, he made a grand gesture of conceding that his critics may have a point, even while largely holding to his increasingly untenable position, and announced a series of “reforms” that amount, at the end of the day, to window dressing. It was an even less persuasive version of his performance than his pretense of holding Wall Street accountable for the crimes that led to the economic meltdown.
Obama’s declared reforms of the massive and opaque government surveillance programs that have dramatically expanded on his watch are as follows:
- Set up a toothless committee to make non-binding recommendations months in the future, once it’s safe to ignore them.
- Hire a privacy officer in the NSA whom few in the agency will take seriously, possibly including the privacy officer him/herself.
- Appoint a privacy advocate to the FISA Court, and pretend that he/she is a reasonable stand-in for a truly adversarial court system.
None of these measures will come close to dealing with the serious Constitutional issues at stake in the continued existence of the government’s surveillance regime. Short of scrapping the NSA and the FISA Court altogether, nothing less than an about-face on the administration’s position on the public’s right to challenge the legal basis of the surveillance programs will even begin to bring government spying into line with the Constitution.
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