Not that they all agree with it, but Congress authorized the government’s expansive surveillance powers and either knew about it or had neglected to know about it despite being offered the right to know about it. That’s the main reason that recent revelations haven’t been politicized like the IRS thing or Benghazi.
On the plus side, there are people on both sides of the aisle who think that surveillance has become too pervasive. That means, at least in theory, that there is some hope of adding transparency and safeguards to the system in an effort to better protect our privacy and prevent abuses. If Rand Paul runs for president, I am sure he will talk about surveillance issues. I expect it will be a topic on the Democratic side of the aisle, too.
I’m more or less in agreement with David Simon:
The FISA court order addressed in this blogpost is for call data and its content is limited to metadata. It is not for wiretaps on any Americans.
PRISM is for internet material and it was first reported in the Washington Post. Obviously, internet postings offer content without the need for any warrant by the very nature of the material itself. But there are far less expectations or legal rights to privacy for stuff posted on the internet then telephonic communications. That’s just so. If you post something on the internet or send email, it is much more in the public domain.
I don’t have any great problem with the FISA court order. With PRISM, I certainly expect law enforcement and counter-terror to avail itself of what is accessible under the law to them from the web. That said, I think it entirely arguable that the legal standards for the privacy of personal communications such as emails ought to be enhanced, commensurate with that of regular mail, perhaps.
Which is a matter for Congress.
Basically, FISA needs to be opened up a lot more, and new safeguards are needed.
I predict that your points are going to be directly challenged by the Obama administration itself when the leaker has been identified (as he fully expects to be) and is charged for aiding the enemy and causing harm to our national security efforts. Clapper, and I believe Obama, have already come out and said that public knowledge of these programs has compromised their ability to prevent terrorism. This suggests that this is, in fact, a BFD. And if there’s such a low expectation of privacy of internet communications, why is it such an important issue on both sides about PRISM not targeting Americans’ communications?
Glenn Greenwald has alluded to another piece of the story that he’s going to break about the extent to which Americans are surveilled under these programs. Most recently, Obama’s having a list of cyber targets to offensively attack has also been leaked. There are more leaks to come.
So far, Boo’s posts on the subject seem to intend to deflect responsibility for these programs, the first on war itself, the second on the author of the Patriot Act, the third on the Senators. Nothing substantive is said about Obama or who he appoints. I think the enormity of these programs, their implications for our civil rights, and what they tell us about Obama’s decision making and values, are all being studiously avoided.
I think it is more a problem with the nation being on a war footing and the target of terror attacks than it is with individual personalities. No politician wants to be blamed for shutting down a capability that might have kept us safe, so neither Congress nor the administration will limit what the NSA can do in any meaningful way. You can blame Obama. That’s fair. On the other hand, I doubt that Clinton or Romney or McCain or any of the other people who might plausibly have become president would be curtailing these programs. So, it’s up to the people to make the politicians see things differently.
Obama and Holder must be fuming that no matter how many whistle blowers they rabidly prosecute, there are still federal employees who cannot be intimidated into silence.
Was Stephen Jin-Woo Kim a whistle-blower?
What wrongdoing did he expose?
How about the clown who the CIA initially used to say that water boarding was only used once and worked like a charm? Was he a whistle-blower, too?
How about the guy who told a story about a botched effort to screw with Iran’s nuclear program? Is it now whistle-blowing when you reveal that an approved operation doesn’t go as planned?
As far as I can tell, the only whistle-blowers who have been prosecuted are Shamai Leibowitz (although I have no idea what he leaked about other than influence-peddling in the Israeli embassy) and Thomas Drake (who got a raw deal, but ultimately received a slap on the wrist).
People who leak classified information for no good reason are not whistle-blowers.
Do you have no concept of history? You might want to read this:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/yes-virginia-government-has-lied-before.html
The government has been spying on its own citizens for a long time.
My idea of relaxation is to read HSCA and Church Committee reports. I know the history of domestic surveillance backwards and forwards. What I want is a government that works effectively, that abides by the law, and inspires others to do the same. I do not consider the government my enemy. I consider it something to control so that others cannot do it (and us) great damage.
I don’t want the progressive movement to be an anti-government movement, or an Anti-American movement, or anti-Establishment movement. I want progressives to be the Establishment.
But we will never get there arguing in favor of leakers and turning fools into heroes. No one will trust us to govern if we can’t even envision a government worth supporting.
We have to learn to act like we belong and not to act like cranks who think this country and this government can do no right.
I am concerned about the degree of domestic surveillance that is going on, but that doesn’t mean that I think people should leak classified information that has nothing to do with wrongdoing.
Progressives are the Establishment. Obama is supposed to be our community-organizer, constitutional scholar, Greatest President Ever. He won his 2008 campaign partially on the basis of progressive positions on domestic issues of national security (in contrast with his support of attacking targets in other sovereign states). He was preferred over Hillary Clinton in part because Clinton wasn’t trusted to be progressive enough on these issues. I’m not going to argue against platitudes. When the Democratic party decided not to prosecute the Bush officials for breaking the law, and granted retroactive immunity (how fucked up was that?), they set these events in motion. Obama followed with secret interpretations of federal law (preventing any debate on the issue) and giving his administration cover to go far beyond what Bush did. Why is Clapper even in his administration? I’m being measured here, because maybe you just need time to internalize what’s going on. But straw arguments will do neither you nor our party any good.
Jesus, Moses, and Mary!
Progressives are the establishment? Did you just write that?
Take a look at the progressive caucus in Congress.
The co-chairs include a Muslim from Minneapolis and a five-foot tall Mexican-American from the Arizona border region. The co-chairs include two Asian-Americans from California, a Jewish woman from Chicago, a black woman from Houston, and some white dude for Rhode Island. The whip is a former Black Panther from Oakland. By my count, only 33 members of the Caucus are not Latino, Black, or Asian and half of them are Jewish or gay and Jewish.
The only member listed from the Senate is Bernie Sanders, although former progressive members like Mazie Hirono, Sherrod Brown, and Tammy Baldwin are in the Senate. The only member of the progressive caucus to join Obama’s cabinet was Hilda Solis at Labor.
Progressives have a degree of power and influence, but we are a fringe within the Democratic Party who only represent urban areas and districts with large universities, like Madison or Iowa City.
Obama is a progressive because he’s lived his whole life in progressive communities like Honolulu and Los Angeles and the Upper West Side or Cambridge or Hyde Park. But the coalition he built was on a skeleton built by Daschle. Look at his Senate and gubernatorial endorsements. He dominated in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, pretty much any place where the Clintons weren’t popular. His support base within the party included the hardcore progressives, but it was support from people representing red states that put him over the top. The same day that Hillary carried New Jersey, Obama tied her in delegates by sweeping all of Idaho’s votes at the convention.
It’s kind of crass to point it out, but Obama’s base of support was made up of people of color and white folks who don’t live near people of color. Iowa set him off on his path. South Carolina righted the ship.
A big win in Mississippi offset a tough loss in Pennsylvania.
You can’t understand Obama without understanding where he stands within the Democratic coalition. He’s a progressive who knows that he can’t rely on progressives to maintain his power.
Bill Clinton understood this, too. He was a prototypical Arkansas Democrat in the mold of Mark Pryor, but he was never going to become president without working with the progressive wing of the party. He was basically the founder of the DLC, which was basically a project of people like Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman. But he didn’t govern that way. I mean, he did to an extent. But he didn’t sound like Evan Bayh. He didn’t totally ignore the base of the party. He knew that he needed their support.
Progressives are not the establishment. The closest we come to that is on college campuses. And Hyde Park values are not mainstream American values. You can hold together a big enough coalition to get elected, let alone govern, by relying on that base of support. The man had to abandon his church and pastor to get elected and you think he can just do as he pleases?
It doesn’t work like that.
Someday soon, we will enjoy a progressive America, but the way progressives behave is holding us back because it prevents us from being trusted.
It’s funny when you say it like that, but I’ll stick with my view: when we have a purportedly Progressive President who was elected on a generally Progressive platform and specifically to roll back the GWOT — all during a time of war — it takes a little bit of denial to write something like we’ll never get to be the Establishment if we do such and such. Obama’s not governing like a Progressive is tangential to my point. He campaigned as one, and the majority of the electorate trusted him to be Commander in Chief. The fact that a broad coalition of voters put him in power only bolsters my argument. But we’ve disagreed before on whether Obama was elected with a mandate. I just don’t understand the propensity among Democrats to undermine the power that we’ve earned by arguing for our own marginalization.
Samuel Huntington, Richard Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, Martin Feldstein, Larry Summers, Glenn Loury, and Richard Herrnstein all spent substantial portions of their lives in the progressive community of Cambridge. By your logic, that makes all of them progressive.
Honestly, I have never seen such a pathetic display of blatantly invalid logic on any putatively progressive blog. There are liberals who live in conservative cities; there are conservatives who live in liberal cities. But thanks for making clear that the best (only?) case you can make for Obama being a progressive is where he has lived. Evidently, you realize that nothing that Obama has said, written or done supports the case that he is a progressive.
You really are clueless.
Did Samuel Huntington grow up in Hawai’i and belong to a Choom Gang? Were Alan Dershowitz’s best friends in college all Pakistanis who had a deep skepticism about U.S. foreign policy? Did Richard Pipes go to Jeremiah Wright’s church? Did Martin Feldstein spend his first few years after undergrad organizing workers on the Southside of Chicago? Do any of them know what it’s like to be interracial, to be raised by a single mom or grandparents?
It’s not a simple as Obama living exclusively in progressive places. He’s lived the life of a progressive, which is more than some crackpot on the internet can say.
and James Risen, NYT
James Risen has not been prosecuted. James Risen was the recipient of classified information about an effort to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program in the 1990’s that went wrong and actually helped advance the Iranian nuclear program. The government is prosecuting his source, not Risen. The source was a former CIA officer who claimed workplace racial discrimination and lost his case. He left the CIA and took classified documents with him. He divulged those documents to Risen in an apparent attempt at revenge. At least, that is the government’s version of the story.
In any case, it wasn’t whistle-blowing for a variety of reasons. The news was old. It was an approved operation that violated no domestic laws. It’s intent seemed mainly to embarrass the CIA rather than tell on them for wrongdoing.
Let us not forget HTLINGUAL. Or COINTELPRO. When I worked for the National Association of Letter Carriers I found out that someone (FBI, CIA) would routinely take and open all mail addressed to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. They probably still do it. Later, I had an elderly couple on my route who had been active Communists in the 1940s and fifty years later someone in the government was still interested in their mail.
If you were in the anti-war movement in the sixties there were agents from the FBI, CIA, DIA and local police forces infiltrating all sorts of groups (Carl Oglesby’s RAVENS IN THE STORM is eye-opening). At a demonstration in downtown Newark I owe my front teeth to a guy who on reflection was undercover for some agency. He pulled me from a group of YAFers who were holding me against a car while the leader approached me with a monkey wrench.
If I’m not mistaken ECHELON has been going strong for about twenty years. And let us not forget James Bamford’s several books over the years on the NSA.
Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t be concerned about the erosion of privacy. It’s that we shouldn’t be surprised.
I’m surprised that anyone who attended an Occupy protest has had their cell phone logged. I’m disgusted with how the Obama administration is dealing with peaceful dissent.
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/security_expert_all_occupiers_phones_were_logged/
Well, you may be disgusted, but Obama doesn’t think very highly of “voices” like yours, either:
In other words, if you criticize Obama or his administration, you hate America.
And people get upset when Obama gets compared to Nixon.
Compare that passage from Obama’s speech to this famous passage from a speech by Agnew:
Agnew and Obama are basically saying the same thing. Nixon got his rhetorical henchman Agnew to fight the polemical war against the counterculture; Obama attacks and mocks progressive ideals himself. So yes, he is worse than Nixon; Nixon had enough shame not to descend that deep into the gutter (although ask is apparently in denial about this.
Given what Bush and Obama have done to dismantle our freedoms, I don’t think there’s any way to read that passage from his Ohio State speech as anything other than his expression of his hatred of and contempt for liberal, progressive values.
And that is completely consistent with Obama’s chiming in with Reagan to condemn the 1960s, as I mentioned here recently:
Note, by the way, by praising Reagan and his anti-government stance here, Obama was one of the “voices” that he condemned in his Ohio State speech. (Obama is able to side with Reagan in detesting government while condemning in his Ohio State speech people who find the government to be a “sinister entity” because for Obama, the government is the national security and surveillance state run on behalf of corporations and the top 1%, as opposed to the (social) democratic, egalitarian state that makes all Americans free.)
we already know that; it’s all your comments are ever about
I also comment on how he’s continuously missed opportunities to respond to the economic crisis by correcting the underlying conditions, and making bad strategic moves, like endorsing cuts to Social Security. I guess my comments could be more diverse if I littered them with mocking stupid Republicans, but I’d consider that a waste of my time and yours.
Oh yeah. Those cuts to Social Security. They’re going to happen ANY day now…
Also, there was that stretch in the 80s and 90s when some of these spy operations were handed over to private groups (The ADL ran one with the help of South Africa; they employed a cop who worked intelligence for the SFPD and who apparently had been seconded to the CIA, as he had photos of people being tortured from various places around the world.) That group spied on my union, a bookstore I visited, as well as lots of local politicians and TV stations. That was a pretty broad dragnet.
can’t say how this got posted, and if you want to delete it, Boo, go ahead.
hah! I thought it was a clever commenta about metadata
Two guys that I disagree with on most things but who are conservative in the correct way on this privacy thing. They both want limits to the intrusive government. Odd that they are not the same on abortion.
Tracking patterns this way brings to mind the concept of foretelling the future or a person’s directions by observing his patterns. What was the Tom Cruise? movie where the police arrested someone before he committed a crime because his patterns demonstrated a probability that he would indeed commit a crime?
Surely privacy is an integral part of innocent until proven guilty? But of course that’s assuming that we’re not just talking observation but instead an actual follow up.
Minority Report? Wasn’t it directed by Spielberg?
That’s the one, thanks!
Because 99% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats in Congress (not to mention a majority on the Supreme Court), support “Big Brother.” Only the irrational, rightwing paranoids and lefties that know history, can read, and can put two and two together have privacy concerns. Ordinary John & Jane Doe would welcome government searches of their entire lives if it was recorded and broadcast as a reality show.
Those kinds of reality shows usually end up with someone being frogmarched into a federal building.
No. Jane discovers that John is sleeping with Betsy and the audience rallies around the devastated Jane and hates John until Betsy dumps John and he begs Jane to take him back. But Jane has found comfort in the arms of Susie. So, John comforts himself with the Bakker Buckets $1,200 Time of Troubles Desserts and found fat instead of god. But that means he qualifies to be on “The Biggest Loser” — a surefire reality show winner because the audience has forgiven him and will root for him. Meanwhile, Jane is a sequestration lay-off and Susie pawned all Jane’s jewelry and cleaned out her bank account before running off with Betsy. …
This entire brouhaha is lame. Who didn’t already know the N.S.A. was doing this with telecoms? What is the big deal if they extended the program into Internet company servers? The Web is a friggin’ public place! Your cell phone calls are flying thru the air!
You must realize retailers are stalking your every move across the Web and compiling demographic data on you. Google Ads reflect key words in the Gmails you write. The ads on the right side of your Facebook News feed do the same thing. Make a comment about your feet hurting and watch how fast an ad comes up for orthopedic shoes. Go visit Amazon and have their ads follow you across multiple blogs and sites. I mentioned an obscure company in a comment on Facebook today and saw their doggone ad on the front page of BooMan Tribune when I stopped by only a couple hours later. Holy Tao! It’s like magic!
You don’t mind Amazon or Netflix knowing intimate details about your interests, tastes and browsing habits but you object to the government knowing? That’s just weird.
And, ya’know, we’ve been living in a surveillance state since WWII. It used to take lots of personnel to infiltrate organizations and put feet on the street to take photos of passing demonstrators for labor unions or anti-nuclear bomb protesters, whatever down thru the decades. Is it more pervasive or more invasive than ever before? Well, I don’t know that it is as far as an infringement of liberty goes. I used to have to put on comfortable marching shoes before the government watched me. Now all I have to do is look at photos of my grandchildren on Facebook.
That’s an extremely high noise to signal ratio to process and it didn’t help them anticipate two losers setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon. I recall they looked up bomb making instructions online… along with at least half a million other idle slackers. So it would seem this massive surveillance has not infringed upon the liberty of madmen. Rational people shouldn’t worry. Instead our issue should be: How much money is being wasted on this shit?!
Read this:
http://spitfirelist.com/news/planet-of-the-apps-on-the-subject-of-those-shocking-disclosures-about-n
sagchq-electronic-surveillance-y-a-w-n/
Read it all. Then you can write about about tin foil hats and those stupid Republicans.
We’re approaching the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s death. It was the murder of our duly elected President by our intelligence community. Any fair reading of the facts leads to this conclusion. America has been going down this road for a long time. People who commit egregious crimes on a Friday don’t go back to their desks on Monday. Most people are intellectual cowards because to admit what it means that you have to take some kind of action and most people are conformists.
Do what you will.
All three branches of government have authorized and blessed the extensive invasions of privacy and the absolute use of the notion of state secrets.
The very first case to formalize state secrets, US. v. Reynolds, defended the government’s right to cover up an accident report that showed government contractor negligence. Nothing related to national security was involved except the contractor was testing an aircraft in development. Nonetheless, the family of the contractor’s employees who died failed to receive their day in court to prove the negligence.
The Obama administration has used this same state secrets privilege to prevent Guantanamo detainees from having their day in court where the government has to prove that they are indeed terrorists deserving of indefinite detention.
And this same expansive use of the state secrets privilege underlies any attempts to challenge the overclassification of documents for CYA purposes instead of real issues of national security.