Today's Headlines and Commentary
Surveillance first:
At President Obama's end-of-year press conference on Friday, he promised a "pretty definitive statement" on proposed NSA reforms after the holiday.
As we noted Friday, the latest Snowden-leaked documents list over 1,000 entities targeted by NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ.
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Surveillance first:
At President Obama's end-of-year press conference on Friday, he promised a "pretty definitive statement" on proposed NSA reforms after the holiday.
As we noted Friday, the latest Snowden-leaked documents list over 1,000 entities targeted by NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ. The list includes some prominent Israelis and has drawn renewed attention to the case of Jonathan Pollard, a former American intelligence analyst who was found guilty of passing classified U.S. information to Israel over 26 years ago; Ruth Eglash reports for the Washington Post.
A Post poll has found that Americans are uneasy about the extent of government surveillance but do a good deal of monitoring themselves. Shocker: "Attitudes toward surveillance often vary depending on who is doing it and how clear the purpose is."
Timothy Lee of the Post claims NSA is "trying to have it both ways" --that is, using its power to compel telecommunications providers to cooperate with its surveillance programs, but "resist[ing] the transparency and judicial oversight that has traditionally accompanied domestic surveillance."
Former Central Intelligence Agency deputy director Michael Morell, went on CBS’s “Face the Nation" to defend NSA's surveillance programs. Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal; here is Bloomberg. Lawmakers also hit the waves on Sunday to sound off on NSA. In a debate on NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Patrick Leahy called for more oversight and Rep. Peter King called Snowden a traitor; on ABC, Rep. Mike Rogers declared that data was not safer in the hands of private companies vs. the government, while Sen. Mark Udall called on the federal government to end bulk metadata collection.
Ken Dilanian of the LA Times writes that Snowden has permanently reshaped the spy world, and the U.S.'s place in it.
In nearly every meeting with foreign leaders or other officials, White House officials face angry complaints about the spying that was revealed in Snowden's leaks and questions about what might come next, officials said. One official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue involves classified material, said senior White House aides spend far more time grappling with the issue than is publicly understood.
Other developments:
A suicide bomber killed 13 soldiers near an army checkpoint outside Benghazi on Sunday; no one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. Ayman Al-Warfalli of Reuters reports.
Syrian government airstrikes killed dozens in and around Aleppo this weekend, reports the Daily Star. The Associated Press is setting the death toll at 32; Reuters says the improvised "barrel bombs" killed at least 42.
Nuclear talks between six world powers and Iran are on hold for the Christmas holiday, reports Reuters.
In a Saturday statement, Al Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen, Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of Islamic Law), disclaimed responsibility for an attack on a military hospital in Sanaa, declaring "this is not our approach" and blaming a fighter for going rogue. Reuters has more.
Violence is growing between rebel forces and the South Sudanese army, writes the Guardian. Four US service personnel were wounded in an attack on military aircraft trying to evacuate Americans from South Sudan on Saturday, reports the AP.
Over at Bloomberg, Noah Feldman writes that the U.S. media has failed to grasp the significance of recent U.S.-China tensions over the East China Sea dispute.
The rising global superpower and the status quo superpower are deeply cooperative and deeply competitive -- at the same time. Hostile military gestures are part of that relationship, but so was the warm Sunnylands summit, to say nothing of separate trade negotiations each side is pursuing with the same Asian countries. In 2013, the year Xi called for “a new type of great-power relationship” between the countries, those contradictions deepened.
Shaker Aamer, a 12-year Guantanamo detainee and the named petitioner in the force-feeding case up on appeal before the D.C. Circuit, notes in a piece in the New Republic notes that 1984 is among the books he has been allowed to read at the prison. Out: The Rule of Law, by Lord Bingham.
We end with some tech talk:
Over at the New York Times blog Bits, Nick Bilton expands his inquiry into Bitcoin beyond speculation as to its future value. He writes:
The real question is not what Bitcoin will be worth next week or next month. It is whether digital currencies like this have promise and, if so, how they could change our world.
The Wall Street Journal proclaims Snapchat the most important technology of 2013--and asks whether we want an erasable internet.
A team of Japanese roboticists blew away the competition on Friday and Saturday at the Pentagon’s Darpa Robotics Challenge 2013 Trials. See the New York Times coverage here.
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Jane Chong is former deputy managing editor of Lawfare. She served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and is a graduate of Yale Law School and Duke University.
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