Anyone who actually believed that joke of a press conference Obama held yesterday about ‘reforming’ NSA spying is kidding themselves. Basically what Obama said that ‘we’re going to keep spying on you, we’ll just get someone else to store your metadata, so get over it.’
Wizbang blog sums up Obama’s BS about the NSA spying perfectly:
This is the President who was surprised to learn that his AG was running a gun-running operation arming the Mexican cartels, he was shocked to discover the IRS was imitating the Spanish Inquisition with his political opponents, and utterly flabbergasted – after meeting endlessly with his golf coach Kathleen Sebelius – that the ObamaCare website didn’t work.
The President is saying that he’s going to set up some commissions to do some stuff and make some recommendations. He wants more commissions to look at the long term storage of metadata.
Here are the problems with all that: Barack Obama. The National Security Agency. The United States Government.
Mr. President, we the people don’t trust any of you. Not one little teeny weenie little bit. At all.
So the NSA’s spying on Americans is going to cease “as it currently exists”. Heh. They are not changing anything. This doesn’t even count for fiddling at the margins.
The administration is going to continue to collect and parse the metadata – and whatever else they’re doing. The only question is where they’re going to store it. The phone companies don’t want to store it because they don’t want to incur the enormous cost of long term storage. They don’t want the security nightmare. And you can bet your last dime they’ll be sued out of existence over leaks or perceptions of leaks or their cooperation, at gun point, with the NSA and the Obama administration.
The President says they’re going to toughen the requirements to look through the metadata for individual information. Heck, they’re going to go back to the FISA court, whose inner workings are secret, and get a warrant. That would be the same court that has turned down less than 100 requests for warrants since 1979. Gee, that makes me feel safe.