Vindication for Snowden? Obama Panel Backs Major Curbs on NSA Surveillance, Phone Record Data Mining
Democracy Now
Thursday, December 19, 2013
A White House-appointed task force has proposed a series of curbs on key National Security Agency surveillance operations exposed by Edward Snowden. On Thursday, the panel recommended the NSA halt its bulk collection of billions of U.S. phone call records, citing “potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.” The panel says telecommunications providers or a private third party should store the records instead. The panel also calls for banning the NSA from “undermining encryption” and criticizes its use of computer programming flaws to mount cyber-attacks. And it backs the creation of an independent review board to monitor government programs for potential violations of civil liberties.
But, but, but why didn’t Snowden go through ‘normal’ whistleblower channels?
Because this is what happens to whistleblowers,
NSA Whistleblower Kirk Wiebe Details Gov’t Retaliation After Helping Expose “Gross Mismanagement”
Democracy Now
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Veteran National Security Agency official Kirk Wiebe helped develop the data processing system ThinThread, which he believed could have potentially prevented the 9/11 attacks. But the NSA sidelined ThinThread instead of the problem-plagued experimental program Trailblazer, which cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Wiebe was among the NSA officials to face retaliation for blowing the whistle on Trailblazer.
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White House Presspuppet Jay Carney says that the WH will be “reviewing the review group’s report.”
Don’t be surprised if the WH appoints another task force to examine the recommendations of this task force, which did not go the way the WH wanted. And if the second task force also comes to the same conclusions, the reports will be buried, the conclusions ignored, and we’ll never hear about it again.