Obama Is Giving Up Some Executive Power, and He’ll Still Get No Credit

[dkf]

122. Well lookee here....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023453672

The choice of words from the official is significant, particularly "couldn't." What the military (or CIA) once couldn't do in initiating a threat, it now can. Because, in practice, the rules changed in the direction of facilitating drone strikes. That was clearly not the impression the president gave in May.

Among] the four changes to how the NSA conducts its surveillance that the president announced last week, none limited the ability of the agency to collect information outright. The two that might have that effect — reforms to Section 215 of the Patriot Act and external review of the processes — were presented without timelines. As the Times put it in a separate editorial, the proposals suggested that "all Mr. Obama is inclined to do is tweak these programs." Which was echoed in how Obama presented them: his proposals were a response to critique, not to an perceived ineffectiveness from their use to surveil terrorists.

In other words, those nebulous changes are meant to assuage concerns, not to actually change the processes with which people took issue — mirroring the proposals on drones. Once a situation arose in which the proposed drone policy required modification to expand their use, the administration appears to have done so. Offering skeptics plenty of justification for taking his new NSA proposals with quite a few grains of salt.

Changing of strategy using more drone strikes and I contend more use of worldwide mass surveillance.