Maybe.... if Obama listens to his advisors on this.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/white-house-release-report-reforms-nsa-spying-article-1.1551792
Something quite interesting that I saw was the recommendation to stop monitoring calls between foreigners. I would have thought they would have allowed for that to remain,
Maybe the NSA gets reigned in a little bit, but as long as the general population isn't interested in privacy, nothing will change.
The string pullers are just going to conclude that:
Privacy is a means to Democracy not an end in it self. Most people proclaim to support democracy, but in reality they would like nothing more than to dominate the society. Most people only collaborate as a means to climb the social ladder.
Everybody (with very few exceptions) that has power will fight against Democracy because Democracy limits power.
Most that are powerless don't want to make the system fairer, they just want to become the ones that exploit the system.
If the NSA does it's "job" properly, they don't get caught. That's pretty much in the job description of an effective spy-don't get caught spying. So if they're effective, how would we know they were getting "scaled back" or "reigned in"?
Hell, if not for Snowden, would we even be having this conversation? Would an advisory panel ever have been created?
It's not the spying that impacts the economy or trust in the government. It's the public knowing about the spying that does the damage.
Nope, entities like this move in one direction-forward, bigger, more encompassing. For them, the benefits of spying far outweigh the costs. Only now, they're going to have to dedicate more resources into spinning the PR.
personally it's more of a problem the NSA is forcing companies to make back doors in their products. even if the government dose have good oversight what's to keep a small team of hackers from using the back doors to steal bank account numbers or even hack a bank.
it would be better if the NSA had a super computer and brute forced people of interest. even then it would need to be something with alot more power then a large group of bitcoin miners could produce.
at least then the gov't can do what it dose and you can be reasonably sure no bot-net could match it.
To think that an agency with such a massive infrastructure will quit using it if they get a piece of paper telling them to is naive. The 4th amendment explicitly prohibits warrantless searches, and that didn't stop them. The FISA court ruled their practices illegal and they continued. Nothing is going to change.
I'm just hoping the funding will be cut for them, along with obamacare.
I don't think that the general population needs to be concerned, just enough people that privacy becomes an issue that politicians begin to pay attention to it as an issue. I would not say at any point that the general population were concerned about SOPA and PIPA, but there were enough people who were noisy enough to slow it down. This is a similar type of issue.
The problem is that there are no real consequences for the NSA in breaking the law. it's not like when the police use an illegal wiretap and then the criminal get away on a technicality, because the information is not being used like that.
I doubt much will change in the long run. Sure government might make up some weak regulations to please the mass public until it "blows over" and then its back to business as usual. The oversight committee sounds like a good idea but who are they going to be employed by? Don't want to be pessimistic but we are doomed in the since of freedom. Everything America used to stand for is completely gone imo.