The National Security Agency – the only part of the government that actually listens. 

On Friday, seven months after the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, President Barack Obama finally addressed the nation about national surveillance.

First off, everyone knows this discussion never would have happened without Snowden’s revelations. For years, the American public remained unaware that the administration considered all Americans’ call records ‘relevant’ to terrorism investigations under section 215 of the Patriot Act. Obama wanted to keep it that way. 

Snowden’s leaks forced Obama to begin what he termed a ‘welcome debate’ about the surveillance programs and their recent activity. Yet somehow Obama managed to stand at the podium and talk for 45 minutes without actually saying anything of importance.

Not only did Obama outline bogus reforms for the NSA, but the majority of his argument was based on widely known, proven lies. Multiple key arguments in Obama’s speech had already been debunked and exposed before he even gave his speech.

Let’s discuss the top three. 

Lie number one: If the NSA program existed before 9/11, the government might have caught one of the hijackers who was living in San Diego and thwarted the attack.   

In his speech, President Obama stated: “The horror of September 11th brought all these issues to the fore… We were shaken by the signs we had missed leading up to the attacks — how the hijackers had made phone calls to known extremists and traveled to suspicious places. So we demanded that our intelligence community improve its capabilities…” 

Truth: The 9/11 Commission report made clear that the CIA had plenty of information that could have led the FBI to the hijacker, al-Mihdhar. However, the CIA failed to pass on what it knew to the FBI, according to an article by the New York Times. If information is not being shared among the top organizations pursuing terrorists, accumulating more information is not the solution.

Lie number two: “The men and women of the intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people. They’re not abusing authorities in order to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails,” Obama stated in his speech.

Truth: Last September, NSA inspector general George Ellard revealed in a letter that National Security Agency employees improperly eavesdropped on the phone calls of girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses. They also reportedly engaged in other “intentional abuses of their authority on 12 occasions since 2003,” according to an article by NBC News. If this does not qualify as abuse of authority in Obama’s mind, who knows what does.  

Lie number three: “Heads of state and government with whom we work closely, and on whose cooperation we depend, should feel confident that we are treating them as real partners,” Obama reassured in his speech. 

Truth: According to one of the documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA monitored the phone conversations of “35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another U.S. government department,” according to an article by The Guardian. It is unlikely those 35 leaders feel as though Obama has been treating them as ‘real partners’ while the NSA listens in on their telephone conversations.

Either Obama knowingly lied to the American public or simply forgot the proceedings of last seven months. Either way, his attempt at reassuring the public that his administration and the NSA will act with more transparency in the future fell flat. 

The changes Obama proposed in his speech are not even worth discussing. With more fiction than fact dictating his arguments, Obama’s reassurances to modify the NSA remain unconvincing. The fate of Obama’s proposals now lies in the hands of a divided Congress, where Obama’s promised reforms are highly unlikely to translate into any sort of action.

So stay classy, Pullman. Big Brother is still watching you.

–Ashley Lynn Fisher is a junior English major from Gig Harbor. She can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of Student Publications.