Obama's Response To Too Much Secrecy About Surveillance... Is More Secrecy

from the you're-doing-it-wrong dept

Obama has been gradually tweaking his vast government surveillance policies. But he is not disclosing those changes to the public. Has he stopped spying on friendly world leaders? He won’t say. Has he stopped eavesdropping on the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund? He won’t say.



Even the report by the group Obama created to review and recommend changes to his surveillance programs has been kept secret.

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Anita Kumar, a reporter at McClatchy, has a good article highlighting how, for all the talk by the Obama administration about how it needs to be more open and transparent about what the NSA is doing, in actuality, the administration has built up the walls even higher, increasing the levels of secrecy ... including secrecy about how he's responded to everything:As is noted in the article, the administration, which likes to pretend it's the most transparent in history, is actually one of the most secretive. Its attempts at transparency have almost exclusively been focused on where it can get the most political bang, not for what areas people expect the government to be transparent about -- such as how it interprets the laws that allow the government to spy on everyone...What's incredible is that it appears that no one high up in the administration seems to recognize how this is a strategy that will almost certainly make things, not better. It may be how the administration is used to functioning, but it makes it much more difficult to believe anything that is said about a supposed "vigorous public debate" being held on the surveillance activities. It also means that as more leaks come out revealing more questionable practices, the constant backtracking and excuses will just destroy whatever credibility the administration has left on this issue. If, instead, it were to actually be transparent and simply reveal things like, and allows for a real public discussion on these matters, that would actually result in some frank discussions that the administration seems terrified of actually having.Extreme secrecy may seem like the easier short-term strategy, but it's just digging an ever deeper hole that the administration is going to have to try to climb out of in the long-term. Hiding reality from a public that's going to find out eventually is just making the problem worse.

Filed Under: nsa, secrecy, surveillance, transparency