Do you trust Big Brother to stop spying?

WHY SHOULD anyone trust the Obama administration's promises when it comes to our civil liberties? That's the question we should be asking after the recent White House announcement that the U.S. spy industry's indiscriminate collection on U.S. citizens would be curtailed.

Indeed, the announcement came on the heels of another revelation of government spying, thanks to documents leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden.

This time, the documents show that, as of 2009, the U.S. had a database (code-named "Nymrod") of 122 world leaders it was keeping tabs on, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Yulia Tymoshenko, then the prime minister of Ukraine (only 11 of the 122 leaders were named in this round of documents).

Last October, Der Spiegel, also relying on documents leaked by Snowden, revealed that the NSA had monitored Merkel's cell phone calls for as long as 10 years. That revelation led to some frosty interactions between German officials and the U.S. In December, Merkel reportedly told Obama in a meeting that the actions of the NSA compared with those of the Stasi--the secret police under East Germany's Stalinist regime before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Merkel also reportedly blasted the NSA as incompetents for their inability to keep secret information out of the hands of Edward Snowden.

Now it's clear that was just the tip of the iceberg. In an article at The Intercept, Ryan Gallagher described the scope of the spying uncovered by the latest revelations:

The NSA uses the Nymrod system to "find information relating to targets that would otherwise be tough to track down," according to internal NSA documents. Nymrod sifts through secret reports based on intercepted communications as well as full transcripts of faxes, phone calls, and communications collected from computer systems. More than 300 "cites" for Merkel are listed as available in intelligence reports and transcripts for NSA operatives to read.

Another recent leaked document from the NSA's Special Source Operations unit, detailed by Der Spiegel and filmmaker Laura Poitras, showed that the Obama administration obtained an order in March 2013 from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court allowing it to monitor communications appearing to relate to certain German corporations. According to Der Spiegel:

The documents do not provide sufficient information to precisely determine the types of data included in the order, and the NSA has said it will not comment on the matter. However, lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union believe it provides the NSA with permission to access the communications of all German citizens, regardless whether those affected are suspected of having committed an offense or not.

Just how much spying are we talking about? As early as 2006, the Special Source Operations division was reportedly sucking up the equivalent of the data in the Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds.

Other revelations about NSA documents reported in the New York Times in late March show that the agency had hacked into the servers of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in order to further the ability of the U.S. to spy. "Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products," the NSA document said. "We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products."

A 2010 document also describes a thinly veiled corporate espionage plot: "If we can determine the company's plans and intentions, we hope that this will lead us back to the plans and intentions of the [People's Republic of China]."

According to the Times, "The NSA saw an additional opportunity: As Huawei invested in new technology and laid undersea cables to connect its $40 billion-a-year networking empire, the agency was interested in tunneling into key Chinese customers, including 'high priority target--Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, Cuba.'"

NO SURPRISE, then, that whistleblower Edward Snowden continues to be vilified by U.S. politicians and their servile lackeys in the mainstream media. A March 25 headline from Fox News, for example, proclaimed, "NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander says future Snowden leaks could lead to deaths."

As The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald wrote:

The NSA engages in this fear-mongering not only publicly, but also privately. As part of its efforts to persuade news organizations not to publish newsworthy stories from Snowden materials, its representatives constantly say the same thing: If you publish what we're doing, it will endanger lives, including NSA personnel, by making people angry about what we're doing in their countries and want to attack us.

But whenever it suits the agency to do so–meaning when it wants to propagandize on its own behalf–the NSA casually discloses even its most top secret activities in the very countries where such retaliation is most likely. Anonymous ex-officials boasted to the Washington Post last July in detail about the role the agency plays in helping kill people by drones. The Post dutifully headlined its story: "NSA Growth Fueled by Need to Target Terrorists."

Greenwald likewise pointed out that NSA supporters have no problem about leaks to the press that tout the supposed "positives" of NSA programs--like the recent disclosure to the Los Angeles Times by a former NSA employee that the agency was intercepting every e-mail, text and phone signal for the entire country of Iraq.

Despite being forced to live in exile in Russia--leading to snide, unfounded suggestions by U.S. politicians that he is working with the Russian government--and continued threats of immediate arrest and imprisonment for the rest of his life were he to step foot on U.S. soil, Edward Snowden recently recently told the Washington Post that he doesn't regret his actions:

For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

MEANWHILE, ON the heels of so many damning revelations, the Obama administration has said it will unveil a legislative proposal to end the NSA's bulk collection of phone records--in favor of allowing phone companies themselves to collect such records, and then delete them after 18 months. If the NSA or other agencies wanted to obtain the records, they would have to seek an order through a special court.

But even under the slightly more circumscribed aspects of the administration's new proposal, the government would still have broad powers to snoop into our lives. As the New York Times reported:

The new type of surveillance court orders envisioned by the administration would require phone companies to swiftly provide records in a technologically compatible data format, including making available, on a continuing basis, data about any new calls placed or received after the order is received, the officials said.

As Greenwald pointed out, it remains to be seen whether Obama's proposal will make it through Congress in its current form. Legislators on both sides of the aisle, not to mention the media pundits, have been proclaiming the bulk collection of phone records to be an invaluable tool in the "war on terror." Nevertheless, Greenwald continued:

the fact that the president is now compelled to pose as an advocate for abolishing this program--the one he and his supporters have spent 10 months hailing--is a potent vindication of Edward Snowden's acts and the reporting he enabled. First, a federal court found the program unconstitutional. Then, one of the president's own panels rejected the NSA's claim that it was necessary in stopping terrorism, while another explicitly found the program illegal. And now the president himself depicts himself as trying to end it.

Whatever test exists for determining whether "unauthorized" disclosures of classified information are justified, Snowden's revelations pass the test with ease. That President Obama now proclaims the need to end a domestic spying program that would still be a secret in the absence of Snowden's whistleblowing proves that quite compellingly.