The original content of Democracy Now! Headlines appears under the Creative
Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License (United States). For more, including their other
shows and media, visit www.democracynow.org.
January 21, 2014

Obama Rejects Panel on National Security Letters, Software Hacking 
-------------------------------------------------------------------


 
President Obama's plan rejects a number of proposals from his own
advisory panel on reforming the National Security Agency including a
call to require court orders for national security letters by the FBI.
It also ignores the panel's call to stop undermining commercial software
in order to launch surveillance or cyber-attacks. Obama accepted a
proposal to establish a panel of privacy advocates to appear before the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but only in special cases.
Responding to Obama's speech, Jesselyn Radack, an adviser to Edward
Snowden and former Justice Department lawyer, criticized Obama for
leaving the bulk collection of metadata intact.

Jesselyn Radack: "I'm happy that the government will no longer be
housing people's records, but that begs the question of why — why
the government should be storing anybody's records at all. And I think a
lot of people might mistake that storing issue for the government not
collecting. And the bulk metadata collection program remains intact; it
continues. And they're going to transition it, but that doesn't really
tell us anything. If they're going to overhaul it in some kind of
fashion, we have no idea. The point is, they are still collecting mass
metadata on hundreds and thousands of innocent Americans."