If the author of the Patriot Act is really so concerned about how it is being utilized then maybe be can join with progressives and libertarians who want to curtail the surveillance powers of the government. Otherwise, he should shut his pie hole, because he’s responsible for the permissive language that makes this “total awareness” project legal.
How many times is Jim Sensenbrenner going to feign ignorance?
Sensenbrenner never has to feign ignorance.
That comes naturally to him.
He has to feign intelligence, competence, and compassion – and he always fails at those.
I don’t know, I’m still trying to decide what to make of all this. For one thing, I’m not sure why I should be more concerned about the government getting all this data from Google, Facebook, etc. than I am about Google and Facebook etc. having all this data in the first place. Some of these companies have been know to help repressive regimes censor the Internet, for instance, so I’m not sure why I should trust them with my data any more than I do the NSA.
I mean, Facebook’s business model is basically to sell your data to advertisers. How much do you trust Facebook with your data? And if they’re misusing it, what can the government do about it?
The government can put you in jail based on its inferences from the data. And there are few ways to clear your name.
All those corporations can be sued if they violate their (constantly changing) privacy agreements.
A few reasons spring to mind:
Perhaps more to the point of Boo’s comment, Facebook is subject to the law in ways that the national security apparatus is not. I’m not saying that PRISM itself broke any laws; I’m saying that our military and intelligence organizations are largely exempt from the laws.
I’m not convinced that asking, ‘is it legal?’ or saying ‘he’s responsible for the permissive language that makes this legal’ actually makes any sense. Are actions legal based on words in legal databases or based on consequences in the world? The telcoms broke the law a few years back, so we changed the law retroactively. We committed war crimes, but were not punished, so those aren’t actually crimes anywhere but the feverdreams of blog commenters.
I’m not sure if ‘is it legal?’ means anything, when it comes to actions undertaken by the national security state. Legal is what they say it is.
Also:
No. They have (too much) influence on legislation, and too much power over whether and how laws get enforced, with too little accountability. But the law is not what they say it is.
4, 5, and 6 are kinda the biggies. Thanks for adding them.
I think I disagree with you about the law, though. The law is what gets enforced. If every legal reference in the country says ‘torturing people is a crime,’ but no legal authority takes action, then torturing people isn’t illegal. It’s merely unfortunate.
Basically, the law is what the courts say it is, and in this case they have the courts’ blessing. I disagree with court rulings all the time, but I don’t get to decide what is legal or even what should be legal.
Sometimes the law is what the OLC says. Then changes according to what the next President says. And very well might change back.
true.
Also, I don’t really have a sense of Merkley, but according to TPM: ‘Merkley then found the NSA intelligence gathering “so out of sync with the law” that he thought it merited public disclosure.’
Just another data point.
If I was building a new Senate from scratch, I’d begin with Merkley.
Those are good points, but I’m still not convinced. I’m not saying the NSA’s actions here are all fine with me, just that I’m reserving judgment. My only argument is that we need to think more carefully about our technology.
So first I just wanted to note that our data is already in the hands of people we shouldn’t trust with it. Google is probably a better example than Facebook anyway. They make their money by selling your data too, and they’re harder to avoid than Facebook.
I would also ask how much privacy is even possible when advanced communications technology is everywhere. Like you’ve got this statement, “Wherever your go you’re on camera.” That is unnerving, but it’s kind of true anyway if you ever go around people with cellphones. As soon as anything untoward happens, those people are all going to pull out their phones and start filming.
And finally, we should think about what it actually means to have tens of millions of people’s phone records. First you have to multiply tens of millions by however many calls, text, and so on a person sends and received in three months.
I’ts no small feat to get anything useful out of that much data. It’s not like anyone is going to sit down and go through people’s records one at a time. That would be equivalent to going to each of those people’s homes and asking if they’ve seen any terrorists–or committed any crimes. To get anything from it you’d have to run some analytics against the data on some very expensive computers.
Oh my goodness,people definitely can be charged with crimes and go to jail based on facebook, twitter, credit card use, etc.
But those records are usually gained by issuance of warrants for specific individuals based on probable cause, not blanket warrants for all users of those services.
And those are usually triggered by complaints from outside of the administration of those services.
Credit cards records do require warrants. It is not complicated to do this at all. Facebook and twitter–no way. Deadbeat dad doesn’t report income. I find photos of deadbeat dad on his wall on a lobster boat or a status about working on the boat. No warrant required to look at his status or wall.
I mean there have been all kinds of cases of rapes and other crimes that have been discovered because people post photos to facebook or tweet them.
The question for Repubs right now is how to exploit the shit Obama and Holder have stepped in now that it’s been revealed by the (foreign) press. Our corporate media is now going to develop the story, which was amazingly allowed to lie fallow until after Obama’s election. The absurd Kafkaesque statements now being made by the like of DiFi & Establishment are comic. It is quite remarkable that Obama’s second term looks to be following the historical course of Bushco—with a huge NSA story emerging soon after re-election.
Repubs have to steer a narrow course–that their totalitarian Patriot Act is objectively fabulous and necessary, but that Team Obama has improperly interpreted the law, and thus overreached and engaged in Tyranny, as Stupidbrenner says—“that’s Un-American!” That’s long been their code word. And of course partisan rats like Stupidbrenner have no shame, so don’t expect any.
So the Repub argument is going to have to be that Obama/Holder have misinterpreted the law and led the FISA court into error and spied on everyone. That’s their assignment if they want to exploit this. Of course the wild card is the Paulnut wing, which has in the past mouthed some claimed (vague) objections to the Patriot Act. Paulnuts need to be forced to state their actual position on the goddammed thing.
Most Repubs are seemingly being pretty coy right now, perhaps they are waiting to see if some Dems start questioning the breadth of these FISA requests and legal interpretations. But I will be very surprised if Repubs and the Wurlitzer decline to turn the heat way up on this one as the story builds.
Frankly, it looks pretty bad and, yes, I doubt most American schmoes were clearly aware that huge amounts of their telecom data was being routinely fed over to the NSA upon request by the FBI, to be picked through at a later date under the guise of some subsequent “investigation”. Obama has a real political problem on his hands and blaming the Patriot Act and our useless rubberstamp FISA judges isn’t going to save the day.
I don’t know. On the one hand, how do the Republicans answer, ‘Our job is to keep America safe, whatever it takes’ and ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?’ That shit runs deep in their DNA.
On the other hand, the real scandal is that Obama is black. So yeah, turning the heat up is maybe inevitable. Although I expect they’ll find some non-obvious-to-rational-people way to do that. Like, they’ll find a Tea Party group who used Verizon and this will become ‘IRS/NSA targeting of the right-wing’ or something.
The Republicans argument so far….crickets.
I expect that to continue.
The President can do some things to avoid the erosion that Bushco experienced, if he will do it.
Of course, that means that Obama has to break from his tendency to be minimalist and over-cautious. And his tendency to be over-solicitous of the interests of members of Congress to the exclusion of ordinary Americans.
If Bradley Manning should be pardoned, it is strictly because he was mistreated. What he did was an unpardonable crime that no government could possibly tolerate. He did way more than tell the American people about some bad things the government was doing, he gave the world our diplomatic cables.
He gave the Wikileaks certain classes of diplomatic cables. Wikileaks has used it journalistic partners to screen the release of those cables–at least until a supposed Wikileaks defector put the whole kit-and-caboodle on a Norwegian newspaper’s web site. It was only the American people and the publics of some other nations who did not know the contents of those cables.
He has confessed to 20 of 22 charges. The trial is going on because the government wants to nail him for life with the Espionage Act. The trial has turned into a star chamber proceeding operating in a kangaroo court. At this point, the outcome is certain.
Pardons are executive clemency. They do not require any reason or extenuating circumstances. Nor do they make assumptions about innocence or guilt.
It was only the American people and the publics of some other nations who did not know the contents of those cables.
Oh bull. You are making shit up.
Everyone except Americans knew about John Kerry’s letter regarding Syria’s readiness to start peace talks?
The trial has turned into a star chamber proceeding operating in a kangaroo court.
Got anything to back that up? Or are you just acting like a Republican, and declaring that the proceedings just gotta be corrupt because you don’t like how they’re going to turn out?
At this point, the outcome is certain. Given the amount of evidence, the outcome has always been certain. It is not a black mark on the government that the defendant’s guilt is so obvious.
I have no idea why Tarheel thinks it is a kangaroo court. I can’t really think of any alternative to throwing the book at the kid because it has to be made absolutely clear to everyone with access to our diplomatic cables that they cannot be disclosed. I wouldn’t put him to death because I oppose the death penalty and I understand that he his heart was in the right place. But I’d certainly seek a very harsh sentence.
The only reason this kid deserves sympathy is because he was treated brutally. After he is convicted, the president should consider reducing his sentence as an acknowledgment that his government was far to rough with Manning. But deterrence is the main thing here, which is why they treated him so badly, too.
I understand the tension between transparency and secrecy in a democracy, but we cannot have an effective diplomatic corp if their cables are no secure. It’s fine to expose wrongdoing, it is absolutely not fine to just dump 270,000 cables on the world.
It is a star chamber because the government is controlling media access in a way to enhance the prosecution and intimidating journalists during their time at Fort Meade.
It is a kangaroo court because the “aiding the enemy” charge is such at stretch and because the judge is procedurally setting up the trial record to minimize the impact of the defense.
There are a number of issues with the diplomatic cables. Why, for example, does a military intelligence tech in Iraq have access to diplomatic cables outside of his theater of battle? Why is there so much rampant overclassification of the information in the cables? Why is some much of them not declassified as soon as they are not longer relevant?
We had an effective diplomatic corps before there were cables. And it is people who keep confidences, not technology. What the data dump exposed is that there were way too many people read into all sorts of information.
But on the transparency side, what the public learned is that stated policy is not the one that is actually in practice. And that lots of private interests get preferential treatment that can actually work against the interests of the American public.
I’m more on the side of transparency. It would be very helpful to the world if randomly during some 15 year period every diplomatic cable globally was made available for all to see.
After given Libby and Cheney a pass for what they did, any talk of deterrence is kinda hypocritical. Especially hitting hard on a naive young man. If Manning indeed did leak the documents (the whole point of a trial or court martial, otherwise we are wasting our money), he deserve props for releasing the “Collateral Murder” video showing the gratuitous murder of a Reuters journalist by slap-happy (drugged?) gunship pilots. That is a war crime, but no one talks of the obligation of the military to report war crimes. Nor does the US military apparently take these events seriously. But, wow, dumping 270,000 cables on the world (a good part of which were past itineraries and talking points and introductions of businessmen) is horrible.
Sometimes US citizens need to see exactly what it is that their diplomats do on a day-to-day basis. As a result of those disclosures, diplomats were also freed of a lot of pretenses.
Wasn’t he held in jail/prison for a long time without being charged?
Well, he was charged after about two months, which is an extremely long time by civilian standards, but this was a military matter. And he’s only going to trial now. The real problem, though, is that they used his suicidal tendencies as an excuse to basically Abu Ghraib him.
Isn’t the other real problem that, along with everything else, he did blow the whistle on some stuff … and he’s the only one being prosecuted?
I’d be more sympathetic to the assertion that the government must prosecute him if they also prosecuted torturers, killers, and war criminals. I know it’s naive to expect that the law apply equally to the powerful and the powerless. But still, it’s a dangerous balancing act.
So how did knowing about John Kerry’s letter harm US interests?
The trial is being run by a judge who defers to the prosecution on procedural matters. Potential mitigating information has been excluded from the trial, limiting the defense. The prosecution was not forthcoming with discovery information as required. Media coverage has been arbitrarily controlled. The feeds from the trial to the media center have failed at convenient and critical moments. The key witness, Adrian Lamo was permanently excused by the judge after a peremptory testimony and cross-examination, but went directly to many media interviews in which he present information beyond what he presented in court and outside of the ability of the defense to cross-examine his statements. Over and over again, secrecy is used as an prosecution response to critical questions. And quite frankly, the President himself pronounced guilt in a press conference; whether the Army took that as the President’s opinion or as a command from the commander-in-chief remains to be seen. I’ve got weeks of reporting from folks who covered the pre-trial hearings and are covering the trial to back that up.
The outcome I was referring to is conviction and life imprisonment under the Espionage Act. That was a stretch from the beginning and still is a stretch. The government has not provided evidence of intent, of the particular information that aided the enemy, or of the enemy in question–unless the US public is now the enemy.
The evidence presented so far, aside from Manning’s plea proffer, is that Manning had legitimate access to the materials that appeared on Wikileaks and that Adrian Lamo claims that Manning chatted with Julian Assange. Waiting for the government to present more evidence. A defendant who has been tried in the media does not have obvious guilt because the contrary information has not come forward. There has not been sufficient information for example as to whether Adrian Lamo was engaging in entrapment in exchange for consideration of some kind from investigators.
The problem is that whenever FISA came up for a vote the Republicans have been near unanimous for it. If you wonder why Issa is still talking about the IRS, it’s because he doesn’t want the finger pointed back at Republicans.
When is the new sunset of the Patriot Act, I know it was recently renewed?
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NY Times Backtracks on Obama’s Credibility adds … ‘On this Issue’
Changed editorial content without revision comment.
Digging the hole deeper
Don’t say stuff that two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee immediately rebut.
And deeper
Don’t fight the release of a court judgement that intelligence agencies violated the spirit of intelligence laws and engaged in unconstitutional domestic spying.
Holy crap.
Kinda gets to what I was trying to say about legality, above.
Here is what David Simon, creator of “The Wire”, says:
http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/
Tommy Vietor is out on Twitter shilling again today.