Obama is draping the banner of change over the NSA status quo.
Bulk surveillance that caused such outrage will remain in place
In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington
repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled
out over decades in response to many of America’s most significant political
scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama’s
much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for “reforming” the National
Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.
Barack Obama speaks about the National Security Agency on 17 January 2014 from the Justice Department in Washington. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and
even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are “serious
questions that have been raised”. They vow changes to fix the system and
ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their
actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically
palatable with empty, cosmetic “reforms” so as to placate public
anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than
before to serious challenge.
This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In
the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had
been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the
US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured
two primary “safeguards”: a requirement of judicial review for any
domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance
by the intelligence community.
But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government’s
requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government’s lawyers could
attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even
housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years
virtually never said no to the government.
Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security
State were repeatedly installed as the committee’s heads, currently in the form
of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne
Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New
Yorker’s Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the
committees “more often treat É senior intelligence officials like matinee
idols”.
As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer
function, have far more often acted as the NSA’s in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.
The same thing happened after the New York Times, in 2005, revealed that the
NSA under Bush had been eavesdropping on Americans for years without the
warrants required by criminal law. The US political class loudly claimed that
they would resolve the problems that led to that scandal. Instead, they did the
opposite: in 2008, a bipartisan Congress, with the support of then-Senator Barack Obama, enacted a new Fisa law that legalized the bulk of the
once-illegal Bush program, including allowing warrantless eavesdropping on
hundreds of millions of foreign nationals and large numbers of Americans as
well.
This was also the same tactic used in the wake of the 2008 financial crises.
Politicians dutifully read from the script that blamed unregulated Wall Street
excesses and angrily vowed to rein them in. They then enacted legislation that
left the bankers almost entirely unscathed, and which made the “too-big-to-fail”
problem that spawned the crises worse than ever.
And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the
values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards.
“Individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress,” he gushed
with an impressively straight face. “One thing I’m certain of, this debate
will make us stronger,” he pronounced, while still seeking to imprison for
decades the whistleblower who enabled that debate. The bottom line, he said, is
this: “I believe we need a new approach.”
But those pretty rhetorical flourishes were accompanied by a series of
plainly cosmetic “reforms“. By design, those proposals will do little more than maintain rigidly in place the very bulk surveillance systems that have sparked such controversy and
anger.
To be sure, there were several proposals from Obama that are positive steps.
A public advocate in the Fisa court, a loosening of “gag orders” for national security letters, removing metadata control from the NSA, stricter standards for accessing metadata, and narrower authorizations for spying on friendly foreign leaders (but not, of course, their
populations) can all have some marginal benefits. But even there, Obama’s
speech was so bereft of specifics – what will the new standards be? who will now control Americans’ metadata? – that they are more like slogans than serious proposals.
Ultimately, the radical essence of the NSA – a system of suspicion-less spying aimed at hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world – will fully endure even if all of Obama’s proposals are adopted. That’s because Obama never hid the real purpose of this process. It is, he and his officials repeatedly acknowledged, “to restore public
confidence” in the NSA. In other words, the goal isn’t to truly reform the
agency; it is deceive people into believing it has been so that they no longer
fear it or are angry about it.
As the ACLU’s executive director Anthony Romero said after the speech:
The president should end – not mend – the government’s
collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data. When the
government collects and stores every American’s phone call data, it is engaging
in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the
constitution.
That, in general, has long been Obama’s primary role in our political system
and his premiere, defining value to the permanent power factions that run
Washington. He prettifies the ugly; he drapes the banner of change over
systematic status quo perpetuation; he makes Americans feel better about
policies they find repellent without the need to change any of them in
meaningful ways. He’s not an agent of change but the soothing branding
packaging for it.
As is always the case, those who want genuine changes should not look to
politicians, and certainly not to Barack Obama, to wait for it to be gifted.
Obama was forced to give this speech by rising public pressure, increasingly
scared US tech giants, and surprisingly strong resistance from the
international community to the out-of-control American surveillance state.
Today’s speech should be seen as the first step, not the last, on the road
to restoring privacy. The causes that drove Obama to give this speech need to
be, and will be, stoked and nurtured further until it becomes clear to official
Washington that, this time around, cosmetic gestures are plainly inadequate.
© 2014 The Guardian
Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security
issues for the Guardian. A former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a
contributing writer at Salon. His most
recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to
Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. His other
books include: Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of
Republican Politics, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the
Bush Presidency, and How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a
President Run Amok. He is the
recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
