Politics, Business & Culture in the Americas

Obama to Announce NSA Reforms



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President Barack Obama is expected to announce changes to the United States’ ongoing surveillance program on Friday at the Justice Department. The address will likely focus on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying program, which gathered data on billions of telephone calls made to, from or within the United States. While President Obama has the executive authority to unilaterally abandon certain surveillance practices, many of the more nuanced reforms he is expected to endorse will require Congressional approval.

Friday’s announcement is another attempt by the Obama Administration to mitigate the fallout from the top-secret documents detailing the U.S. surveillance program, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last May. The leaks drew international outrage from U.S. allies like Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and German Chancellor Angela Merkel—all of whose private communications were targeted by the NSA. In another blow to the program, a federal judge ruled in December that the surveillance program violated privacy rights, deeming it unconstitutional.

The long-term implications of the NSA spying on U.S. diplomatic and economic relations is the subject of the Winter 2014 Americas Quarterly’s Hard Talk Forum, penned by U.S. Army War College professor Gabriel Marcella and former State Department and National Security Council official William McIlhenny, which is available for preview here.

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