After months of criticism regarding the National Security Agency’s data collection program, last week, President Barack Obama announced changes to the program. No longer will the NSA be allowed to collect phone records of average citizens as it currently does in its never-ending quest to seek out the bad guys who threaten the United States.
Although we can and should appreciate Obama’s effort to end parts of the NSA’s controversial phone data collection program, many aspects of the NSA’s work were left largely unchanged. Now, the NSA must get a court order from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court — or FISA — to collect phone data, and there must be some belief that the data collected has a connection to a potential terrorism suspect.
However, the changes don’t get to the heart of the problem: our inability to move forward from 9/11.
It’s been more than 12 years since the 9/11 attacks, and in that time, the U.S. has found itself paralyzed by fear of the next attack. The actions taken by George W. Bush’s administration hardly helped. Rather than spending all of our resources finding and eliminating the terrorist threat, we invaded Iraq, which in turn helped destabilize an already fragile part of the world, left suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay with little hope of a trial or due process, and we entered a world where the NSA is always listening.
After 12 years, it’s time to leave an awful decade of war and despair behind us and move forward. Heck, most of you reading this right now have probably spent the vast majority of your life never knowing a United States that wasn’t at war.
That’s frightening and very sad.
Thankfully, we’ve left Iraq, are in the process of leaving Afghanistan, and finally starting to roll back some of the egregious violations of our civil liberties that Congress stole as a result of the Patriot Act.
Despite all of that, we’ve had to deal with rampant spying by our own government agencies, legislative and executive branches unable to come to an agreement on how to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and the nonstop use of drones to perpetuate the war on terror, often with tragic results.
After a decade of living in fear of the next attack, it’s past time to end the mindset that a terrorist is lurking around the corner and that our intelligence services must do everything — including collecting data from everyone’s phone calls — just to prevent the next attack. The FBI, CIA and yes — to an extent — the NSA has done a wonderful job preventing possible terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, but the additional cost to American liberty is unnecessary.
Should the NSA have the ability to listen to suspected terrorists or those with connections to suspected terrorists?
Absolutely.
Should they also have the ability to hear our phone calls, look at our emails or see what we’re up to on social networking sites for no reason?
Absolutely not.
In no way am I saying we need to let our guard down completely because there are awful people in the world who mean to do us harm. We can, however, prevent potential terrorists from carrying out their heinous acts without completely eroding our freedom in the process.
I support Obama, voted for him twice and spent much of 2008 working on his campaign, but I can say without a doubt in my mind that one of his biggest disappointments has been his inability to end the Bush-era blunders that dogged this country for longer than a decade.
The government is perfectly capable of protecting our nation against all enemies — foreign or domestic — without any of us having to live in fear of having our own freedom compromised by overzealous bureaucrats. Obama’s reforms are a start, but this needed to happen years ago.
[Joel Mendelson is a UF graduate student in political campaigning. His columns appear on Mondays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 1/27/2014 under the headline "President Obama’s NSA reforms don’t go far enough"]
