Just a few months after it was revealed that the NSA was hacking into our phones and electronic communications’, President Obama has proposed a reform for the FISA to “restore public confidence”.
Obama said in a statement yesterday:
“Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate but not always fully informed way,” Obama said. “But given the history of abuse by governments, it’s right to ask questions about surveillance, particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives.”
“One of the concerns that people raise is that a judge reviewing a request from the government to conduct programmatic surveillance only hears one side of the story … [that] may tilt it too far in favor of security, may not pay enough attention to liberty,” Obama said. “While I’ve got confidence in the court and I think they’ve done a fine job, I think we can provide greater assurances that the court is looking at these issues from both perspectives, security and privacy.”
On the same day Obama proposed this plan, the NSA also came out to reveal that they have “touched” about 1.6% of our internet information.
According to the Huffington Post, the Agency shared a paper that claimed legal authority for its spying, where it said how much it “touches”.
The memo stated:
According to figures published by a major tech provider, the Internet carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day. In its foreign intelligence mission, NSA touches about 1.6% of that. However, of the 1.6% of the data, only 0.025% is actually selected for review. The net effect is that NSA analysts look at 0.00004% of the world’s traffic in conducting their mission — that’s less than one part in a million. Put another way, if a standard basketball court represented the global communications environment, NSA’s total collection would be represented by an area smaller than a dime on that basketball court.
Mmph! How will the people of the internet feel about this?
