OBAMA’S PLAN TO END NSA SPYING ON AMERICANS JUST EYEWASH

Washington, 25 Jumadil  Awwal 1435/26 March 2014 (MINA) – US President Barack Obama’s plan to end the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance on Americans’ phone records, known as metadata collection program, is just eyewash, a political commentator says.

American investigative journalist Dave Lindorff made the remarks in a telephone interview with Press TV on Tuesday, commenting on reports that Obama is pushing Congress on a proposal that would overhaul NSA telephone surveillance, ending the so-called bulk collection of telephone records and replacing it with a “new kind of court order” on individual surveillance.

“Obama is coming up with this idea, this proposal, because the whole country is getting incensed over the continuing revelations that the NSA is spying on all of us and everything we do. So he is trying to come with this sort of sop that he is going to fix something,” Lindorff said, Press TV quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting, Tuesday evening.

“But, you know, the surveillance of phones is a small of piece of it.  What he is doing is going back to the way it was before the 9/11 rules started going into effect. It wasn’t that good in the first place because it is still a FISA Court, which is not a real court.  It is a bunch of judges who look at one side of the evidence presented just by the government and then decide whether to authorize the surveillance. It’s not a real court where both sides get to argue the case before the judge. So it’s not that great,” he added.

The FISA Court, or the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is a US federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign spies inside the US by federal law enforcement agencies.

And Obama’s proposal “does not cover the much more important issue of monitoring the internet. So it’s really the proof that the president and the government are alarmed at the anger out there among the public, but it doesn’t really fix the problem that we are really living in an increasingly police state, America,” Lindorff noted. (T/E01/IR)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)