As Obama Rejects NSA Changes - Need For A New Internet Arises
Moon of Alabama ■ The still ongoing revelations about aggressive NSA spying on the world have led to hopes that some restrictions would be introduced to it. But that is not going to happen. All President Obama is going to do about it is holding a nice speech that promises to mostly kick the can over to Congress where any reform is bound to die. The NYT previews that speech under the somewhat misleading headline: Obama to Place Some Restraints on Surveillance:
President Obama will issue new guidelines on Friday to curtail government surveillance, but will not embrace the most far-reaching proposals of his own advisers and will ask Congress to help decide some of the toughest issues, according to people briefed on his thinking....The result seems to be a speech that leaves in place many current programs, but embraces the spirit of reform and keeps the door open to changes later.■ Rejecting most of the advice of his own hand selected review committee will reinforce the impression that it is not the president that has upper hand over the security services but that the NSA itself is the one that sets the policies. Even the NSA collection of U.S. phone metadata, which in over a decade has not helped in even one terrorism case, will be kept in its current form. ■ There is need for a new Internet based on open source and publicly reviewed hardware and software. Proprietary systems can not be trusted. The EU (ex-Britain) could launch a program to develop such a network. This would be a decade long public effort comparable to the development of the Ariane rockets and the Airbus industry. Both these projects succeeded despite U.S. efforts to sabotage them. A precondition of such a new program are EU laws for strict privacy and laws that forbid its own security services to preemptively try to manipulate the development of the new network systems. Only with such laws, and severe penalties in place, could such a development create the trust that has been lost in the Internet in its current form. [Image: FreeAnons]
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