As one who grew up in the era of the McCarthy hearings and witch hunts for Communists under every chimney, I fear that President Obama does not viscerally understand the danger of the mass surveillance techniques our intelligence agencies now have. (I remember coming home from school, turning on the TV and watching McCarthy on it. I was a child. Instinctively I recognized an evil, hateful man and I cried. And sure enough McCarthy silenced great writers and made life miserable for some of our best and brightest intellectuals and public servants. That's where this paranoid surveillance leads.)
The oversight recommendations in Obama's speech are unclear and insufficient in my view.
The President claims he will narrow the purview of the intelligence agencies to terrorism and place limits on the use of the intelligence data when it comes to criminal prosecutions. I think that is easy for Obama to promise, but difficult to guarantee.
So, all in all, I would say that Obama analyzes the problem and the dangers astutely but doesn't offer adequate protections for the privacy and freedom of the American people in the future.
When the Founding Fathers adopted the Bill of Rights, they intentionally used broad language to protect our privacy and our freedom. President Obama did not adequately address just how his proposals, uncertain as they are, will guarantee that those broad constitutional protections will be respected in the future.
I fear that this discussion will be assigned to the wastebasket of some functionary in the government and eventually just be co-opted by the very invasive intelligence mentality that lead to the excesses in the first place.
Right now, the NSA's metadata and surveillance programs are excessive. I gather that their aim is still pretty much on very specific political or social groups. In the aftermath of the Occupy movement, people were arrested under strange circumstances. Yet gun-nuts using vicious language abound on the internet. Thus, I gather that the goal of the government surveillance remains intimidation primarily of goofy leftists but not so much of truly dangerous people on the right.
Obama has not taken us much beyond the era of McCarthy and Hoover and the surveillance of the civil rights leaders. He does not begin to deal with how you prevent the surveillance and metadata collection from being abused for political or social purposes. He expresses an understanding of that danger, but suggests no concrete plan to address it.
The speech is a beginning but much more discussion is needed on this issue.
Fighting terrorism is important, but the problem is that terrorism has to be defined more clearly. And the oversight of the NSA surveillance needs to be better defined, more inclusive of different points of social and political views and needs to report to the public.
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