In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised." They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.

This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.

But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.

Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols."

As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA's in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.

The same thing happened after the New York Times, in 2005, revealed that the NSA under Bush had been eavesdropping on Americans for years without the warrants required by criminal law. The US political class loudly claimed that they would resolve the problems that led to that scandal. Instead, they did the opposite: in 2008, a bipartisan Congress, with the support of then-Senator Barack Obama, enacted a new Fisa law that legalized the bulk of the once-illegal Bush program, including allowing warrantless eavesdropping on hundreds of millions of foreign nationals and large numbers of Americans as well.

This was also the same tactic used in the wake of the 2008 financial crises. Politicians dutifully read from the script that blamed unregulated Wall Street excesses and angrily vowed to rein them in. They then enacted legislation that left the bankers almost entirely unscathed, and which made the "too-big-to-fail" problem that spawned the crises worse than ever.

And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards. "Individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress," he gushed with an impressively straight face. "One thing I'm certain of, this debate will make us stronger," he pronounced, while still seeking to imprison for decades the whistleblower who enabled that debate. The bottom line, he said, is this: "I believe we need a new approach."

But those pretty rhetorical flourishes were accompanied by a series of plainly cosmetic "reforms". By design, those proposals will do little more than maintain rigidly in place the very bulk surveillance systems that have sparked such controversy and anger.

To be sure, there were several proposals from Obama that are positive steps. A public advocate in the Fisa court, a loosening of "gag orders" for national security letters, removing metadata control from the NSA, stricter standards for accessing metadata, and narrower authorizations for spying on friendly foreign leaders (but not, of course, their populations) can all have some marginal benefits. But even there, Obama's speech was so bereft of specifics - what will the new standards be? who will now control Americans' metadata? - that they are more like slogans than serious proposals.

Ultimately, the radical essence of the NSA - a system of suspicion-less spying aimed at hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world - will fully endure even if all of Obama's proposals are adopted. That's because Obama never hid the real purpose of this process. It is, he and his officials repeatedly acknowledged, "to restore public confidence" in the NSA. In other words, the goal isn't to truly reform the agency; it is deceive people into believing it has been so that they no longer fear it or are angry about it.

As the ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero said after the speech:

The president should end - not mend - the government's collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans' data. When the government collects and stores every American's phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an 'unreasonable search' that violates the constitution.

As is always the case, those who want genuine changes should not look to politicians, and certainly not to Barack Obama, to wait for it to be gifted. Obama was forced to give this speech by rising public pressure, increasingly scared US tech giants, and surprisingly strong resistance from the international community to the out-of-control American surveillance state.

Today's speech should be seen as the first step, not the last, on the road to restoring privacy. The causes that drove Obama to give this speech need to be, and will be, stoked and nurtured further until it becomes clear to official Washington that, this time around, cosmetic gestures are plainly inadequate.
(c) 2014 Glenn Greenwald. was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy," examines the Bush legacy. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

IN THE middle of the 70s, Ariel Sharon asked me to arrange something for him - a meeting with Yasser Arafat.

A few days before, the Israeli media had discovered that I was in regular contact with the leadership of the PLO, which was listed at the time as a terrorist organization.

I told Sharon that my PLO contacts would probably ask what he intended to propose to the Palestinians. He told me that his plan was to help the Palestinians to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy, and turn Jordan into a Palestinian state, with Arafat as its president.

"What about the West Bank?" I asked.

"Once Jordan becomes Palestine, there will no longer be a conflict between two peoples, but between two states. That will be much easier to resolve. We shall find some form of partition, territorial or functional, or we shall rule the territory together."

My friends submitted the request to Arafat, who laughed it off. But he did not miss the opportunity to tell King Hussein about it. Hussein disclosed the story to a Kuwaiti newspaper, Alrai, and that's how it came back to me.

SHARON'S PLAN was revolutionary at the time. Almost the entire Israeli establishment - including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres - believed in the so-called "Jordanian option": the idea that we must make peace with King Hussein. The Palestinians were either ignored or considered arch-enemies, or both.

Five years earlier, when the Palestinians in Jordan were battling the Hashemite regime there, Israel came to the aid of the king at the request of Henry Kissinger. I proposed the opposite in my magazine: to aid the Palestinians. Sharon later told me that he, a general at the time, had asked the General Staff to do the same, though for a different end. My idea was to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank, his was to create it in the East Bank.

(The idea of turning Jordan into Palestine has a generally unknown linguistic background. In Hebrew usage, "Eretz Israel" is the land on both sides of the Jordan River, where the ancient Hebrew tribes settled according to the Biblical myth. In Palestinian usage, "Filastin" is only the land on the West side of the river. Therefore is quite natural for ignorant Israelis to ask the Palestinians to set up their state beyond the Jordan. For Palestinians, that means setting up their state abroad.)

AT THE time, Sharon was in political exile.

In 1973 he left the army, after realizing that he had no chance of becoming Chief of Staff. This may seem odd, since he was already recognized as an outstanding battlefield commander. The trouble was that he was also known as an insubordinate officer, who despised his superiors and his peers (as well as everybody else.) Also, his relationship with the truth was problematical. David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that Sharon could be an exemplary military officer, if only he could abstain from lying.

When he left the army, Sharon almost single-handedly created the Likud by unifying all the right-wing parties. That's when I chose him the first time as Haolam Hazeh's Man of the Year and wrote a large biographical article about him. A few days later, the Yom Kippur War broke out, and Sharon was drafted back into the army. His part in it is considered by many as pure genius, by others as a story of insubordination and luck. A photo of him with his head bandaged became his trademark, though it was only a slight wound caused by hitting his head on his command vehicle. (To be fair, he was really wounded in battle, like me, in 1948.)

After the Yom Kippur war, the argument about his part in that war became the center of "the battle of the generals". He started to visit me at my home to explain his moves, and we became quite friendly.

He left the Likud when he realized that he could not become its leader as long as Menachem Begin was around. He started to chart his own course. That's when he asked for the meeting with Arafat.

He was thinking about creating a new party, neither right nor left, but led by him and "outstanding personalities" from all over the political landscape. He invited me to join, and we had long conversations at his home.

I must explain here that for a long time I had been looking for a person with military credentials to lead a large united peace camp. A leader with such a background would make it much easier for us to gain public support for our aims. Sharon fitted the recipe. (As Yitzhak Rabin did later.) Yet during our conversations it became clear to me that he had basically remained a right-winger.

In the end Sharon set up a new party called Shlomtzion ("Peace of Zion"), which was a dismal failure on election day. The next day, he rejoined the Likud.

The Likud had won the elections and Begin became Prime Minister. If Sharon had hoped to be appointed Minister of Defense, he was soon disabused. Begin did not trust him. Sharon looked like a general who might organize a coup. The powerful new Finance Minister said that if Sharon became commander-in-chief, he would "send his tanks to surround the Knesset."

(There was a joke making the rounds at the time: Defense Minister Sharon would call for a meeting of the General Staff and announce: "Comrades, tomorrow morning at 06.00 we take over the government!" For a moment the audience was dumfounded, and then it broke out into riotous laughter.)

However, when Begin's preferred Defense Minister, the former Air Force chief Ezer Weizman, resigned, Begin was compelled to appoint Sharon as his successor. For the second time I chose Sharon as Haolam Hazeh's Man of the Year. He took this very seriously and sat with me for many hours, in several meetings at his home and office, in order to explain his ideas.

One of them, which he expounded at the same time to the US strategic planners, was to conquer Iran. When Ayatollah Khomeini dies, he said, there will begin a race between the Soviet Union and the US to determine who will arrive first on the scene and take over. The US is far away, but Israel can do the job. With the help of heavy arms that the US will store in Israel well before, our army will be in full possession before the Soviets move. He showed me the detailed maps of the advance, hour by hour and day by day.

This was typical Sharon, His vision was wide and all-embracing. His listener was left breathless, comparing him to the ordinary little politicians, devoid of vision and breadth. But his ideas were generally based on abysmal ignorance of the other side, and therefore came to naught.

AT THE same time, nine months before the Lebanon War, he disclosed to me his Grand Plan for a new Middle East of his making. He allowed me to publish it, provided I did not mention him as the source. He trusted me.

Basically it was the same as the one he wanted to propose to Arafat.

The army would invade Lebanon and drive the Palestinians from there to Syria, from whence the Syrians would drive them into Jordan. There the Palestinians would overthrow the king and establish the State of Palestine.

The army would also drive the Syrians out of Lebanon. In Lebanon Sharon would choose a Christian officer and install him as dictator. Lebanon would make official peace with Israel and in effect become a vassal state.

I duly published all this, and nine months later Sharon invaded Lebanon, after lying to Begin and the cabinet about his aims. But the war was a catastrophe, both militarily and politically.

Militarily it was a demonstration of "the Peter principle" - the brilliant battle commander was a miserable strategist. No unit of the Israeli army reached its objective on time, if at all. The Israeli-installed dictator, Bachir Gemayel, was assassinated. His brother and successor signed a peace treaty with Israel, which has been completely forgotten by now. The Syrians remained in Lebanon for many years to come. The Israeli army extricated itself after a guerrilla war that lasted 18 full years, during which the despised and downtrodden Shiites in Israeli-occupied South Lebanon became the dominant political force in the country.

And, worst of all, in order to induce the Palestinians to flee, Sharon let the barbarous Christian Phalangists into the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila, where they committed a terrible massacre. Hundreds of thousands of outraged Israelis protested in Tel Aviv, and Sharon was dismissed from the defense ministry.

At the height of the Battle of Beirut I crossed the lines and met with Yasser Arafat, who had become Sharon's Nemesis. Since then, Sharon and I did not exchange a single word, not even greeting each other.

IT LOOKED like the end of Sharon's career. But for Sharon, every end was a new beginning.

One of his media vassals, Uri Dan (who had started his career in Haolam Hazeh) once coined a prophetic phrase: "Those who don't want him as Chief of Staff, will get him as Minister of Defense. Those who don't want him as Minister of Defense, will get him as Prime Minister." Today one could add: "Those who did not want him as Prime Minister, are getting him as a national icon."

An ex-general, Yitzhak Ben-Israel, told me yesterday: "He was an Imperator!" I find this a very apt description. Like a Roman imperator, Sharon was a supreme being, admired and feared, generous and cruel, genial and treacherous, hedonistic and corrupt, a victorious general and a war criminal, quick to make decisions and unwavering once he had made them, overcoming all obstacles by sheer force of personality.

One could not meet him without being struck by the sense of power he emanated. Power was his element.

He believed that destiny had chosen him to lead Israel. He did not think so - he knew. For him, his personal career and the fate of Israel were one and the same. Therefore, anyone who tried to block him was a traitor to Israel. He despised everyone around him - from Begin down to the last politician and general.

His character was formed in his early childhood in Kfar Malal, a communal village which belonged to the Labor party. His mother, Vera, managed the family farm with an iron will, quarreling with all the neighbors, the village institutions and the party. When little Arik was injured in a fall on a pitchfork, she did not take him to the village clinic, which she hated, but put him on a donkey and led him for several kilometers to a doctor in Kfar Saba.

When rumor had it that the Arabs in neighboring villages were planning an attack, little Arik was hidden in a haystack.

Later in life, when his mother (who still managed the farm) visited his new ranch and saw a low wall with holes for irrigation, she exclaimed: "Ah, you have embrasures! Very good, you can shoot through them at the Arabs!"

How could a poor army officer acquire the largest ranch in the country? Simple: he got it as a gift from an Israeli-American billionaire, with the help of the finance minister. Several dubious large deals with other billionaires followed.

SHARON WAS the most typical Israeli one could imagine, embodying the saying (to which I modestly claim authorship): "If force does not work, try more force."

I was therefore very surprised when he came out in favor of the law dispensing with the military service of tens of thousands of orthodox youngsters. "How can you?" I asked him. His answer: "I am first of all a Jew, and only after that an Israeli!" I told him that for me it was the other way round.

Ideologically, he was the pupil and successor of David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, leaders who believed in military force and in expanding the territory of Israel without limit. His military career started for real in the 1950s when Moshe Dayan put him in charge of an unofficial outfit called Unit 101, which was sent across the border to kill and destroy, in retaliation for similar actions committed by Arabs. His most famous exploit was the massacre of Qibya village in 1953, when 49 innocent villagers were buried under the houses which he blew up.

Later, when requested to put an end to "terrorism" in Gaza, he killed every Arab who was caught with arms. When I later asked him about killing prisoners, he answered: "I did not kill prisoners. I did not take prisoners!"

At the beginning of his career as commander he was a bad general. But from war to war he improved. Unusual for a general, he learned from his mistakes. In the 1973 war he was already considered the equal of Erwin Rommel and George Patton. It also became known that between the battles he gorged himself on seafood, which is not kosher.

THE MAIN endeavor of his life was the settlement enterprise. As army officer, politician and successively chief of half a dozen different ministries, his central effort was always to plan and set up settlements in the occupied territories.

He did not care whether they were legal or illegal under Israeli law (all of them, of course, are illegal under international law, for which he did not give a damn).

He planned their location, with the aim of cutting the West Bank into ribbons which would make a Palestinian state impossible. Then he rammed it through the cabinet and the ministries. Not for nothing was he nicknamed "the Bulldozer".

The "Israel Defense Army" (its official Hebrew name) turned into the "Settlers Defense Army", sinking slowly in the morass of the occupation.

However, when settlements obstructed his plans, he had no compunction about destroying them. When he was in favor of peace with Egypt, in order to concentrate on the war with the Palestinians, he destroyed the entire town of Yamit in North Sinai and the adjacent settlements. Later he did the same to the settlements in the Gaza Strip, attracting the enduring hatred of the settlers, his erstwhile proteges. He acted like a general who is ready to sacrifice a brigade to improve his overall strategic position.

WHEN HE died last week, after lying in a coma for eight years, he was eulogized by the very people he despised, and turned into a shallow folk hero. The Ministry of Education compared him to Moses.

In real life he was a very complex person, as complex as Israel. His personal history is interwoven with the history of Israel.

In yet another example of African American moral and political deterioration in the Age of Obama, a new Pew Research poll shows Blacks are more in favor of NSA spying on Americans than are whites or Hispanics. Moreover, the data indicate that Blacks are probably more likely to favor prosecution of Edward Snowden for his NSA spying revelations, than are other ethnic groups.

Back in September, polling history was made when Black Americans were more in favor of air strikes against Syria than whites and Hispanics - the first time, ever, that African Americans were ranked as the most bellicose major ethnicity in the United States.

Something ugly has happened to Black America since 2008, eroding - if not reversing - the progressive Black historical consensus on issues of peace, civil liberties and social justice that has prevailed since pollsters began soliciting Black opinion. One must conclude that, either Black progressivism was a much shallower political current than previously believed, or that the presence of a Black president has been such a shock to Black consciousness, so profoundly disorienting, that it has grievously distorted collective Black perceptions of reality. The African American worldview has been mangled beyond imagining.

Back in June of last year, when MSNBC's Black plantation hands Melissa Harris-Perry and Joy-Ann Reid were calling for Edward Snowden's head on a platter, and Black South Carolina congressman James Clyburn was telling people that Snowden's NSA revelations were nothing more than "an effort to embarrass the president," 60 percent of Blacks and an equal proportion of Hispanics approved of "the government's collection of telephone and Internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts." Only 44 percent of whites wanted the NSA's metadata collections to continue. Pew Research pollsters asked the same questions after President Obama's speech on NSA spying, last Friday. The survey showed that NSA's stock had fallen considerably over the past six months, but Blacks remain more NSA spy-friendly than whites and Hispanics. Forty-three percent of African Americans still approve of the agency's telephone and internet data collection, compared to 39 percent of whites and 40 percent of Hispanics, while majorities of whites (55 percent) and Hispanics (52 percent) opposed Obama on spying. Only 49 percent of Blacks would break with administration policy. In conventional political terms, African Americans - who are subjected to hyper-surveillance like no other group in the U.S. - are most heavily represented on the far Right on this issue, steadfast with "their" president.

Democrats are substantially more likely than Republicans to favor criminal prosecution of Edward Snowden, according to the Pew poll. Sixty-two percent of Democrats, versus 54 percent of Republicans, want to throw the book at Snowden. African Americans make up one quarter of the Democratic Party. The data indicate that Black zeal to protect Obama contributed significantly to the Democrats' lynch-mob mentality.

The polls show that the "Obscene 14" Black lawmakers that voted to shield the NSA's meta-data trolling from congressional defunding, in July, represented the majority of Black opinion at the time (60 percent). Put another way, Black majorities appear prepared to take even the most right-wing positions if they perceive it to be in defense of the First Black President. (The House effort to curtail the NSA's telephone and internet data-gathering failed by only 7 votes.)

Forty percent of Blacks told a Washington Post/ABC poll, in late August and early September, that they supported President Obama's threatened airstrikes on Syria. Although majorities of Blacks (56 percent), whites (58 percent) and Hispanics (63 percent) opposed Obama's air war, African Americans were the most supportive of war - the first time that has ever happened. Given that Blacks were far more pro-peace than either whites or Hispanics in the pre-Obama era, the conclusion is inescapable: substantial proportions of Black Americans are now more concerned with defending Obama than with preventing the death of thousands of innocents abroad, at U.S. hands. In siding with the NSA's spies, Blacks have shown they are prepared to sacrifice their own civil liberties in order to safeguard the prestige of the icon in the White House.

If an individual exhibited such lifelong personality and values reversals, her relatives and friends would immediately suspect an emotional breakdown, and seek professional help. Caregivers would try to identify the cause of the mental collapse, and find ways to avoid further harm.

Actually, a diagnosis of collective African American mental illness, brought on by the sudden and unexpected advent of a nominally Black president, is the kindest analysis available. The alternative diagnosis is that Black folks were always closet reactionaries, who were just waiting for the emergence of a Black chief executive to show their true colors.

In President Obama's big speech on NSA spying, he made himself the hero of the story—and Edward Snowden the villain.

It's not comforting to all U.S. citizens and everyone living abroad, including foreign leaders, that Obama said: "I maintained a healthy skepticism toward our surveillance programs after I became president." Big deal! You kept them up, and may even have expanded them, allowing the government to track all our phone calls and our every key stroke, without any predicate of wrongdoing on our parts.

It's not comforting to any of us that he boasted that "improved rules were proposed by the government and approved."

It's not comforting to any of us that he boasted that "we've sought to keep Congress continually updated on these activities."

First of all, there's a lot of fudge room in "sought to."

Secondly, how many members of Congress were actually informed of all these activities? Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon was repeatedly stymied by the Obama Administration when he tried to find out about these programs. And Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about it, saying last March that it was not "wittingly" collecting information on millions of Americans. Clapper later said that his comment was "the least untruthful thing" he could have said. This isn't informing Congress; this is criminally misinforming Congress.

And thirdly, why didn't Obama allow members of Congress to inform us, the citizens? Don't we have a right to know when the Executive Branch is crushing our Fourth Amendment rights "to be secure" in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects?"

It's also not comforting to any of us that last year Obama said in a speech that "we needed a more robust public discussion about the balance between security and liberty," since his Administration had been gagging members of Congress for years from telling us what they know about some of these programs.

The whole first half of Obama's speech was designed to show how he's been the guardian of our rights, when he's been violating them.

He did acknowledge, however, that critics have been right to point out that the NSA's mass gathering of our phone records "has never been subject to vigorous public debate."

Which brings us to whistleblower Edward Snowden. The undeniable fact of the matter is that we wouldn't be having this "vigorous public debate" right now, and Obama would not have given this speech, were it not for Snowden (and for reporter Glenn Greenwald). Obama mentioned Snowden twice by name. "Given the fact of an open investigation, I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Snowden's actions or his motivations." But this pretention of piety didn't stop Obama in the next breadth from saying that "the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out" has revealed "methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations in ways that we might not fully understand for years to come." So Obama said he wouldn't prejudice the case against Snowden, and then he goes ahead and prejudices it.

Yes, it was nice to hear the President admit that after 9/11 "the risk of government overreach" went up, and that "the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security also became more pronounced."

And yes, it was nice that he made some modest changes in the oversight of the NSA.

"The president's speech outlined several developments which we welcome," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "Increased transparency for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, improved checks and balances at the FISA court through the creation of a panel of advocates, and increased privacy protections for non-U.S. citizens abroad - the first such assertion by a U.S. president - are all necessary and welcome reforms."

But Obama did not tell the NSA to stop scooping up all our phone calls. "The president's decision not to end bulk collection and retention of all Americans' data remains highly troubling," Romero said. "The president outlined a process to study the issue further and appears open to alternatives. But the president should end - not mend - the government's collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans' data. When the government collects and stores every American's phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an 'unreasonable search' that violates the Constitution."