 Reining In The Guard Dogs
As today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, many Americans have the day off from their regular jobs, as part of a national day of service. For those people who took off from work early on Friday, to try and capitalize on the three day weekend, it's likely they missed President Obama's NSA reform speech on Friday. So as part of our service to you, our readers, today, we're recapping the President's address from Friday, where he proposed several reforms to the NSA.
To say both the speech and the major reforms the President proposed have had a mixed reception would be the understatement of the year - and we're saying that knowing there are still eleven-plus months of 2014 ahead of us.
Just as Dana Liebelson of Mother Jones and Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor predicted, neither the security hawks or the civil libertarians were happy with the President's proposed reforms. As Greg Sargent clearly outlined though, the reforms are a good first step - but the fundamental argument between privacy and security remains unresolved.
President Obama effectively said as much in his address, noting the conflict between security and privacy.
As all of our staff members are currently or have been pet owners at one time, we tend to think of the NSA and other U.S. security services a bit like guard dogs. As an owner of a guard dog, you want the animal occasionally to come off as the biggest, meanest animal in existence, in order to scare away potential trouble.
Of course, then the problem becomes the same one the U.S. has now - how do you effectively control a beast like that...
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