Venezuela

Possible. On a visit to Moscow, the president, Nicolás Maduro, said he would consider an asylum request and said the whistleblower "deserves the world's protection". But he later told reporters that his country has not received an application for asylum from Snowden and dodged the question of whether he would take Snowden with him when he left.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/02/edward-snowden-nsa-asylum-application-list-countries

Transparency, Declassification, and the Obama Presidency

By Lee White

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Steven Aftergood (Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and the publisher of the blog Secrecy News)

In retrospect, the Administration erred in making its early public statements promising unprecedented transparency. The President raised expectations so high that the ensuing disappointment was inevitable. The smarter move would have been to demonstrate openness in actions, not in words, and to exceed public expectations.

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Thomas Blanton (Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.)

There are obviously some differences of opinion on this subject. My own is that too often we conflate "the Obama administration" with actions of specific agencies or specific bureaucrats, when in fact the policy decision at the top has been pretty good, just stymied by ongoing bureaucratic obfuscation in the middle and the bottom. Or even worse, continuity by federal career employees of Bush policies that the White House has not succeeded in changing.

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Anne Weismann (Chief Counsel for Citizen's for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington-CREW)

In my assessment, the administration's record on transparency is mixed. Without question, President Obama put strong, pro-transparency policies in place that really set the benchmark for a more open government. The problem has been in implementing those policies at the agency level. Agencies have been encouraged to make proactive disclosures, but they have shown little regard for the quality of and public interest in the information they are posting. And the administration has not provided them much guidance on this front.

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Patrice McDermott (Executive Director of OpenTheGovernment.Org)

I think it is a very mixed bag. There are strong indications that the initiatives and efforts of the Obama Administration have begun to institutionalize changes in the attitudes of components of the Executive Branch, mostly in the area of domestic right-to-know. While the effectiveness of FOIA as a disclosure and accountability tool for the public continues to lag behind the promises the President and the Attorney General made, much more attention is being directed by agencies to improving the process, and agencies are putting more information out proactively (without requiring or waiting for a FOIA request)—and not just the usual stuff they want you to know. The greatest frustration on the domestic policy front has been the ongoing changes in policy personnel in the White House, creating problems of follow-through and consistency.

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http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2012/1209/Transparency-Declassification-and-Obama-Presidency.cfm

Documents Detail N.S.A. Surveillance Rules

By SCOTT SHANE

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On Thursday, in the latest release of documents supplied by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now believed to be hiding in Hong Kong, The Guardian published two documents setting out the detailed rules governing the agency’s intercepts...They show, for example, that N.S.A. officers who intercept an American online or on the phone — say, while monitoring the phone or e-mail of a foreign diplomat or a suspected terrorist — can preserve the recording or transcript if they believe the contents include “foreign intelligence information” or evidence of a possible crime. They can likewise preserve the intercept if it contains information on a “threat of serious harm to life or property” or sheds light on technical issues like encryption or vulnerability to cyberattacks.

And while N.S.A. analysts usually have to delete Americans’ names from the reports they write, there are numerous exceptions, including cases where there is evidence that the American in the intercept is working for a terrorist group, foreign country or foreign corporation.

The documents, classified “Secret,” describe the procedures for eavesdropping under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, including an N.S.A. program called Prism that mines Internet communications using services including Gmail and Facebook. They are likely to add fuel for both sides of the debate over the proper limits of the government’s surveillance programs.

They offer a glimpse of a rule-bound intelligence bureaucracy that is highly sensitive to the distinction between foreigners and “U.S. persons,” which technically include not only American citizens and legal residents but American companies and nonprofit organizations as well. The two sets of rules, each nine pages long, belie the image of a rogue intelligence agency recklessly violating Americans’ privacy.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/us/politics/documents-detail-nsa-surveillance-rules.html

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Today, in the latest release of classified NSA documents from Glenn Greenwald, we finally got a look at these minimization procedures. Here's the nickel summary:

The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

I have a feeling it must have killed Glenn to write that paragraph. But on paper, anyway, the minimization procedures really are pretty strict. If NSA discovers that it's mistakenly collected domestic content, it's required to cease the surveillance immediately and destroy the information it's already collected. However, there are exceptions. They can:

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The offers from Venezuela and Nicaragua appeared to be linked to outrage in Latin America over the treatment last week of President Evo Morales of Bolivia, whose plane was denied permission to fly over several European countries because of what Bolivian officials said were unfounded suspicions that Mr. Snowden was aboard. Mr. Morales was on his way home from a meeting in Moscow.

Mr. Maduro had previously voiced sympathy for Mr. Snowden. He frequently bashes the United States, depicting it as an imperialist bully in Latin America. But at the same time he has shown a desire to improve relations with the United States, directing his foreign minister to start talks with Washington aimed at smoothing the rocky relationship with the top buyer of his country’s all-important oil exports.

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Russia was apparently among the original countries to which Mr. Snowden submitted an asylum request, but a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, has said since that the request was withdrawn.

On Thursday, Mr. Putin sent a telegram to President Obama noting the Fourth of July holiday and restating his commitment to holding a summit meeting in Moscow in September, ahead of the G20 conference, which will be in St. Petersburg. American officials have signaled that Mr. Obama is unlikely to visit Moscow if Mr. Snowden is still holed up at Sheremetyevo airport.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/06/world/snowden.html