NSA reform and Snowden Parks.
The Administration and Congress now circulate and leak various draft proposals aimed at reforming NSA, from purely cosmetic to more substantial. One approach that may be somewhat effective with limited disruption is to amend NSA mandate to make it an agency responsible for protecting Americans’ privacy.
Under this proposal, NSA mission would be expanded to include protecting citizens’ electronic privacy, and ensure that our data is safe from mass collection and unauthorized access by other government bodies and third parties. It would have to create additional layers of bureaucracy and reallocate the resources accordingly. It would even make sense for NSA to take a lead in lobbying this, as an in-house solution.
It is clear that voracious appetite for citizens’ data fueled by American agencies’ counterintelligence-counterterrorism agenda forms a zero-sum game with constitutional requirements for privacy. It may seem that what I’m suggesting amounts to putting a fox into a henhouse. However, it may not be totally hopeless. We already have an agency whose mandate likewise includes mutually contradictory objectives - Federal Reserve. Under its dual mandate, it is supposed to both fight inflation and aim at full employment, and while generally these two aims works at cross-purposes, Fed handles the balancing arguably reasonably well. We may well expect NSA to achieve a similar balancing; while current crop of NSA analysts may sneer at privacy concerns, once the changes take root, the subsequent generation of NSA employees would grow to be a lot more protective of its new auxiliary mission, and hopefully effective at that.
To be sure, I would rather prefer a radical reorganization and takedown of the entire Bush domestic surveillance architecture. So the approach discussed in this post in rather minimalist, and is not a substitute, but relatively easily implementable component. Coupled with better oversight, tighter data collection rules, and adversarial proceedings at FISA this may help the problem.
As for Snowden, he already seems to have achieved the impossible, with the numerous reform proposals and at least limited public debate. Although Time didn’t name him its Person-of-the-Year, which I’d rather prefer, he perhaps would be best remembered as a Rosa Parks of the budding Anti-Surveillance Civil Rights movement (break the law, provide the spark).
Under this proposal, NSA mission would be expanded to include protecting citizens’ electronic privacy, and ensure that our data is safe from mass collection and unauthorized access by other government bodies and third parties. It would have to create additional layers of bureaucracy and reallocate the resources accordingly. It would even make sense for NSA to take a lead in lobbying this, as an in-house solution.
It is clear that voracious appetite for citizens’ data fueled by American agencies’ counterintelligence-counterterrorism agenda forms a zero-sum game with constitutional requirements for privacy. It may seem that what I’m suggesting amounts to putting a fox into a henhouse. However, it may not be totally hopeless. We already have an agency whose mandate likewise includes mutually contradictory objectives - Federal Reserve. Under its dual mandate, it is supposed to both fight inflation and aim at full employment, and while generally these two aims works at cross-purposes, Fed handles the balancing arguably reasonably well. We may well expect NSA to achieve a similar balancing; while current crop of NSA analysts may sneer at privacy concerns, once the changes take root, the subsequent generation of NSA employees would grow to be a lot more protective of its new auxiliary mission, and hopefully effective at that.
To be sure, I would rather prefer a radical reorganization and takedown of the entire Bush domestic surveillance architecture. So the approach discussed in this post in rather minimalist, and is not a substitute, but relatively easily implementable component. Coupled with better oversight, tighter data collection rules, and adversarial proceedings at FISA this may help the problem.
As for Snowden, he already seems to have achieved the impossible, with the numerous reform proposals and at least limited public debate. Although Time didn’t name him its Person-of-the-Year, which I’d rather prefer, he perhaps would be best remembered as a Rosa Parks of the budding Anti-Surveillance Civil Rights movement (break the law, provide the spark).