Clear, cold and windy this way-too-early Thursday here on California’s north coast, and the still-big moon hangs way-up high out over the Pacific.
Winds are monitored to be between 5 and 8 mph, and on the direct shoreline, sounds even stronger.
And one big, cash-wallop off the NSA bullshit — Brazil awarded a $4.5 billion contract Wednesday to Swedish Saab AB instead of US Boeing: “The NSA problem ruined it for the Americans,” a Brazilian government source said on condition of anonymity.
(Illustration found here).
The backlash/fallout over Eddie Snowden’s disclosures of the immense-frightful work of the NSA have already knocked hard many US companies, especially those high-brow tech firms — they seem afraid of the financial future. No wonder — the world is caught in the NSA claw.
The head honchos of these tech companies met with President Obama this week, and wanted some relief — via Bloomberg:
Obama’s relationship with Silicon Valley is being tested by the damage from disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the government’s collection of Internet and phone data.
Obama has said he wants a solution that balances national security with privacy interests of U.S. citizens.
Also at stake is whether his broader policy agenda gets sidetracked by the furor over spying.
For the companies, it’s a matter of the bottom line.
“They see real risk to their market share,” said James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“You’ve got German, Chinese even Russian companies saying ‘Hey, buy from us, that way you won’t be at risk.’
It’s crazy. That’s what this has become — an opportunity for commercial advantage as well as an uproar over privacy.”
Reports about U.S. spying abroad may cost U.S. companies as much as $35 billion in lost revenue through 2016 because of doubts about the security of their systems, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a policy research group in Washington.
While the administration’s agenda included talking about fixes made to the government’s health-care website and federal information technology development, Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said “99 percent” of the meeting was spent on discussing the NSA surveillance.
Valerie most-likely was spooling about that lost 1 percent. A fly on the wall would probably record as close to 100 percent. That’s the noise right now.
Meanwhile, Obama’s so-called ‘review panel’ on the NSA released its report yesterday and there was good and bad. An analysis from the Guardian:
Though far less sweeping than campaigners have urged, and yet to be ratified by Obama, the report by his Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology comes as the White House faces growing pressure over its so-called “bulk collection” programs from US courts and business interests.
Earlier this week, a federal judge ruled that the bulk collection program, first revealed by the Guardian in June through a court order against Verizon, was likely to be in violation of the US constitution, describing it as “almost Orwellian” in scope.
The White House was stung into releasing the report weeks earlier than expected after meeting America’s largest internet companies on Tuesday.
The firms warned that failure to rebuild public trust in communications privacy could damage the US economy.
In its report, the review panel, led by former security officials and academics including the husband of one of Obama’s top advisers, said the NSA should be removed of its power to collect the metadata of Americans’ phone calls.
Instead, it suggested that private companies such as phone carriers retain their customer records in a format that the NSA can access on demand.
This is likely to anger the intelligence community, which argues for direct access, but also fall foul of telephone companies, who have privately warned those drafting more ambitious reforms in Congress that such a scheme would be impractical and dangerous.
…
Despite revelations that the NSA tapped the phones of world leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, the report proposes only minimal overseas reforms, merely requiring higher clearance to “identify both the uses and the limits of surveillance on foreign leaders and in foreign nations.”
On the security of the internet, the report says the US government should not “undermine efforts to create encryption standards” and not “subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable” commercial security software.
…
But the report does little to address a string other privacy breaches revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and several of its recommendations deal with tighter vetting requirements for staff and contractors with access to sensitive information, designed to prevent future leaks.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the privacy advocates suing the Obama administration over the bulk surveillance, expressed disappointment with the review group report.
“The review board floats a number of interesting reform proposals, and we’re especially happy to see them condemn the NSA’s attacks on encryption and other security systems people rely upon,” attorney Kurt Opsahl said.
“But we’re disappointed that the recommendations suggest a path to continue untargeted spying.
“Mass surveillance is still heinous, even if private company servers are holding the data instead of government data centers.”
After meeting the report’s authors on Wednesday, the White House said Obama would be taking a copy with him to read over Christmas and would decide which recommendations to accept before delivering his state of the union address on January 28.
And Obama was indeed “stung:” As late as Sunday, White House officials told reporters that the report would not be released until January. But in the days since, the NSA and the Obama administration have been buffeted by criticism, from a widely ridiculed 60 Minutes documentary on the NSA, to Judge Richard Leon’s scathing ruling, to the tech giants’ impatience with the surveillance agency.
What ‘in the days since’ does that mean? Obama is turning out to be just another politician who caters to politics as usual.
Sharp-eyed Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel turns over the review panel’s study, and finds shit. One point she quotes from the report:
As an aside, we note that the very existence of these protections in the United States can help promote and preserve democratic accountability across the globe.
In light of the global influence of the United States, any threat to effective democracy in the United States could have negative and far-reaching consequences in other nations as well.
By helping to maintain an effective system of checks and balances within the United States, the special protections that FISA affords United States persons can therefore contribute to sustaining democratic ideals abroad.
Wheeler adds: This is a remarkable sentiment, but I’m not sure it holds.
She will have more posts on the report I’m sure. She’s the best detail person on government bullshit around.
And all this allows assholes out of the bag — care in ugly, former Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who got his panties in a bind on Tuesday about assluym for Snowden: “I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,” Woolsey said. “He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.”
In response, Jonathan Turley reminds us Woolsey has long been an asshole:
Of course, Woolsey’s attitude toward holding CIA officials accountable is a bit more generous.
When Congress demanded repercussions after the Aldrich Ames disaster on Woolsey’s watch, he refused and said “[s]ome have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled. Sorry, that’s not my way.”
No, your way is hang whistleblowers while shielding intelligence officials.
After the Snowden disclosures, Congress has pledged reforms.
The White House has admitted abuses.
Now a federal judge has declared the entire program to be unconstitutional. Yet, Woolsey wants Snowden dead.
Welcome back to America’s Animal Farm.
No animals, though, I’m familiar with — watch your cookies.