21st Century Wire says…
Wake up! No, seriously wake up – Barack Obama is about to give his ‘momentous’ NSA speech.
It not yet clear what the intended purpose of the speech is, but in typical Soetoro fashion, we expect him to talk a lot, but say very little.
Here is how the White House PR spin cycle works: knowing that very little people will actually be watching the “historic” speech on TGI Friday, White House Mandarins have gone all out to pre-release what the President ‘intends to say’ – including all the right sound bites and pro-constitutional rhetoric. When you listen to the actual speech it will be much more vague than the pre-speech PR bomb. Remember, with Obama – it’s all about what he intends to do, not about what will actually get done. So if you’re expecting anything earth-shattering, do not hold your breath. Says the Washington Post:
“President Obama will call Friday for significant changes to the way the National Security Agency collects and accesses telephone metadata of U.S. citizens, moving to transition away from government control of the information and requiring the government to obtain a court order to access it, a White House official said.”
Sounds good, right? But wait, hold on…
“But he also will say that the United States should be able to “preserve those capabilities while addressing the privacy and civil liberties concerns” raised by recent disclosures in the media about the government control of the metadata, the official said.
Obama has asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and intelligence officials to deliver a plan to transition away from government control of the information before the program is due to be reauthorized by a secret court March 28th”.
Soetoro: “I checked with Holder, he says it’s ‘legal’ if we do it off shore, or with Schmidt. Have to run, I’m about to tee off on the back nine”.
Again, we’re forced to call ‘bullshit’ here.
Yes, they will still be collecting your data – most likely, arrangements have already been made with large corporate contractors already involved in the NSA data hoovering operation – to hold their data off-site from government servers, or off-shore held with British GCHQ centre in Menwith Hill, or at Pine Gap in Australia at – but access will still be granted as and when.
Of course, we’d LOVE to be wrong about this one.
Stay tuned for our post-speech critique of Barry’s Big NSA Adventure…
READ MORE NSA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire NSA File