I had the exact same thought that Steve Benen describes when I read Al Franken’s take on the whole NSA flap.
So I suppose one of two things is likely. One, those who’ve been skeptical of NSA surveillance will say, “Well, if Franken’s comfortable with them, maybe the programs aren’t as bad as I’d feared,” or two, those same folks will say, “Maybe Franken isn’t quite as credible as I’d hoped.”
To be more accurate, I had both of those thoughts simultaneously. Apparently, the House is getting a closed-door briefing on the impact of the NSA leaks.
It’s interesting to see which lawmakers are taking which positions, especially because it isn’t entirely predictable.
Is there anyone in Congress whose judgment you trust?
Nope. Russ Feingold, but he’s not there anymore. And even he can be disappointing sometimes. However, in general, I would trust his thinking even if I disagreed with it.
I disagree with Feingold about a number of things, but I remember on disagreement in particular: he was too dismissive of John Edwards.
oops
What do you mean? IIRC, Feingold called Edwards a fraud and phony from the jump.
He did, and I held it against him. His judgement really sucked.
Yup, Feingold had Edwards number from the beginning. And Edwards turned out to be an even bigger fraud than even Feingold thought.
“I don’t understand how somebody could vote, five or six critical votes, one way in the Senate and then make your campaign the opposite positions,…”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/25/feingold-rips-edwards-aga_n_83225.html
As I wrote at Benen’s blog:
I’m sorry, but I listened to his Air America radio shows during lunch for the couple of years he was on before he left to run for the Senate – and this guy is a genuine Liberal/Progressive.
Paul Wellstone was his friend, and hero. And Wellstone is about as Liberal/Progressive as anyone in the Senate – including Kennedy and Sanders.
Franken ain’t no Red Dog Democrat (I calls ’em that, ’cause there ain’t nothin’ Blue about ’em!).
He has real Liberal bona fides chops.
And I don’t see him selling out, since he’s running for Senate again in 2014.
That leads me to the inevitable conclusion, that maybe he knows more than we know.
What would Benen say about Wyden or Merkley or Udall or Ellison, in the same article, who “told ABC News he has deep concerns and that very few members of Congress knew the extent of the secret surveillance.” And who said “We need to peel it back and we need to make sure congress is considering the constitution when we write these laws.”
Merkley: “This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans’ privacy.”
Wyden: “…a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy.”
Udall: ‘did everything short of leaking classified information” to bring attention to the National Security Administration’s seizure of Americans’ phone records.’
I imagine Benen would say, “Well, if Ellison and the others aren’t comfortable, maybe the programs aren’t as innocuous as I imagined in my content-free dreamings’ and also ‘Maybe Ellison and the others aren’t all that credible …”
Franken’s smart as hell. Do you believe that he believes that he’s been told everything, in his secret briefings? It certainly appears so.
I count myself lucky to be represented by Merkley but Wyden is a sometimes a strange critter although they both speak alike on this issue. We’re fighting with Merkley to get the filibuster rules changed now instead of later.
ah you’ve just realized it’s about trust. smartpants has been all over that for a week now.
Speaking of trust, does everyone forget this already?:
http://bit.ly/19ne90r
(link from The Nation)
I actually had forgotten. But it’s no biggie. Every such attempt that we’ve heard about has been revealed to the public. The system works!
From Calvin’s link (which wasn’t a rickroll, as I suspected):
There are plenty of Congresscritters that I trust on lots of different issues, although very few that I trust on everything. I mean, they’ve all got to make some compromises. That’s the game.
But in a way the people that I “trust” the most are the hardcore right-wing reps – your Bachmann’s, your Cruz’s, your Inhofe’s. In that I trust them to be completely wrong about every issue under the sun. So whatever their opinion on something is I’m generally confident that the opposite is true.
Kind of sad I guess, and no better than the wingers wanting the opposite of whatever Obama wants just because he wants it. But that’s just how we roll in a perfectly partisan political environment.
Oh, and to answer the question: Bernie Sanders. If he’s fine with this, I’ll have a really hard time maintaining the outrage.
Remind me again how Sanders voted on closing GITMO?
Unfortunately, only the ones who remain critical after the briefing.
Because – there are two briefings to consider. The first is the one given collectively to the legislators. The second is the private briefing which, for all we know, was given to representative X: “We have the recording of the conversations you had two years ago with Tiffany. If you’re so fond of spilling secrets, how’d you like that one spilled?”
These records will only be used to protect national security. To allow a Congressperson to speak critically of the program would be harmful to national security. Therefore, using these records to keep Congress critters quiet is an eminently legal use of the program. The logic is airtight.
In a holistic sense, no. But on an issue-by-issue basis there are some that I trust more than others. When it comes to “national security” I don’t trust anyone who could actually get a security clearance, but I also know better than to think that I can affect the outcome without a one-way trip to GitMo.
I’ll need some more information myself, but a consensus of Sanders, Franken and my two Senators would pretty much set my compass on this.
Briefings, as in “Senator, here is a little bit of what we know about you.”?
well obviously i trust a 29 year old anarchist unelected dropout to decide what secrets the government should have, more than people i got to vote for!
what could possibly go wrong??
It’s about trust and verification. Does Al Franken have a way to go about verification of his trust in what the intelligence community is telling him?
The question isn’t whether you trust Franken. It’s whether you trust the people who are briefing Franken. Most of them were doing the same or similar things in the Bush administration. Therefore, on this score, I’m more skeptical. Especially considering how government IT contractors work their relationships with the government client representatives with regard to setting up future business.
That’s why I keep saying that the White House needs to move this to an independent investigation and stop doubling down on defending NSA.
And why I say that the issue of whether you trust the President is a false one.
So you’re saying Franken is a rube who can’t tell good advice from bad?
Or may not be able to tell what he knows. There’s an awful lot of closing ranks on this right now from Democrats just at the right-wing radio discovers that they can frame it as Obama’s doing and nobody notices the fact that it came out of the Bush administration, the generals running it are Bushies, and Clapper has already been demonstrated to have shaded the truth relative to the very clear wording of the Verizon FISA court order.
The incuriosity of Congress, given that their role if oversight, is amazing.
There also might be some legal consequences of the Verizon order relative to businesses affected doing what ACLU has already done–suing from their standing as a customer. But in ACLU’s case, they are seeking the expungement of data; corporations would be seeking damages.
Well, your comment strikes me as a little paranoid. Though I guess, under the circumstances, some paranoia may be justified.
You may also be right that Franken may not be able to tell what he knows. But if so, it seems just as plausible to me that he doesn’t want to reveal whatever he knows in order to protect our national interests, rather than for partisan reasons.
Agree that the Congresses of our era are generally bad at oversight.
That all depends on what “national interest” means these days.
It seems to me there has been a little bit of the leadership wanting to get all of the Democratic caucus to be on the same page. Maybe they will allow Wyden, Merkley, and Udall to maintain their skepticism.
But it looks like the public will be winding up with less information to validate these assurances than we really need. And that allows for a lot of speculation all over the place and especially on talk radio. From a political communications standpoint, the constant pushing of talking points does not clear the air.
But there are medical professionals, for example, who are beginning to be afraid that the sort of metadata analysis being described automatically compromises the privacy of their patients, especially for those specialists in mental health. And they are consulting with HIPAA legal specialists and IT people about how to minimize that risk to their patients.
But for now the biggest message that a lot of folks are taking away is “Don’t dissent.”
And of course, there is a lot of speculation about how the failures of this analysis led to a lot of false positives in the Occupy Wall Street movement, giving the police the excuse to shut down guaranteed First Amendment freedoms.
I can assure you that lots of folks without top secret clearance have access on a regular basis to all sorts of medical records. You don’t get treated without allowing it (to your insurance company, to office staff, to researchers, etc.)
As others have said, the only difference is that they can’t come and arrest you.
But other than that, there ought to be virtually no expectation of privacy in 2013.
Except for this troubling legal restraint on the government:
There are privacy laws that govern dealings with medical facilities and other private and non-profit organizations–and most government organizations. You can sue the for breach of privacy if you have suffered some specific damage.
You cannot sue the NSA for breach of privacy because “state secrets”. If they draw an incorrect conclusion or use a bad phone number, or your information but after identity theft and before you resolve it, and you get arrested and thrown in the slammer despite being innocent, you have no way to get to the source of the error and hold them accountable.
Yes, how frequently is that going to happen? That won’t matter if it happens to you.
There’s one democracy that I know of that has less domestic trust (i.e. more domestic fear) than we do, and that’s Israel. After 9/11, we turned to Israel for a lot of consultation on how to build a surveillance state and handle the occupation of Iraq. I think that the tolerance for more militarization and surveillance in the US is probably correlated with how much one supports the behavior of the Israeli government on these matters.
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Interesting comment I found at Tikun Olam.
From my recent diary – PRISM: Harvesting Americans’ Personal Data. A new comment today by bluto:
No. There’s no one in Congress whose judgment I trust. There’s only one of them I know at all, and, while I think highly of that one, I don’t really know him that well.
So, I’m pretty sure there’s nobody there who is going to vote exactly as I would.
I just talked to my brother who is a retired Marine and has worked at NSA in high level positions for more than 10 years, though not on the side of the agency that is embroiled in the current controversy.
There is no one whose honesty, integrity, or moral compass I trust more than his. Without being able to go into any detail, he told me that more oversight is warranted and he would welcome it. That said, he personally has never witnessed anyone at NSA doing anything illegal or unethical. If he had, he would have done something about it.
His desire for more oversight is based on his insider knowledge of the potential for abuse when you combine the agency’s incredible capabilities with human nature.
Of everything that Snowden said, the one thing that made sense above all was that the architecture of the system provided the capabilities of “turnkey tyranny”. And he mentioned growing abuses–which leads me the suspect that BAH has some internal personnel problems. (Congressional games with the budget and job uncertainty could be one thing that contributes to that issue.) We know from past leaks that they have had problems similar to those most hospitals or other institutions that depend on privacy face.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of R.I. is pretty good, since you asked.
off hand l’d have to no, and apparently 94&% of the country agrees with that assessment.
If you’re in Congress, you’re automatically complicit. The only way to avoid it, is not to play the game.
A real progressive — not some fraud like Franken — would run for office, just to prove that the silent American majority that presently refrains from voting is far more progressive than the electorate we usually see at the polls. And that it sits out elections because no one left enough to engage them ever runs.
Then, having won — because of the silent American majority that presently refrains from voting and is far more progressive than the electorate we usually see at the polls — he or she would turn right around and resign.
Renouncing the world and withdrawing to a monastery at this stage is recommended, but optional.
Nice Harrington quote, btw. What’s the context for it?
This, this right here is why I don’t trust the judgment of the Congress.
Who knows what kind of bullshit CIA and NSA and who knows what agencies are spewing to scare the pants off of the congresscritters about all the terrible shit that they’ve prevented and now can’t to preserve their power. Who knows what favors are being called in or skeletons dug up for the same reason?
Maybe if Congress had demonstrated it’s worthiness, but as I’ve said before it’s teeming with wannabe fascists and cowards.
It’s also teaming with them.
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I was a .. shudder … computer security expert. I certainly am not today. But I was on a citizen committee that provided info for Congress. We were trying to get sensible encryption export laws passed.
Anyways, I mention this because the political appointee who was assigned to talk to us said one thing I’ll never forget. Paraphrasing: “In reviewing the history of this issue I’ve found that on many occasions there has been detailed public testimony arguing for changes to the export restrictions. Then the Congressional committee meets in closed session with the CIA and NSA and they decide unanimously not to do anything.”
We had no answer to that.
I still don’t trust anyone or anything associated with our Big Brother agencies.
Sergeant at Arms of the United States House of Representatives
When he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States,” lo and behold the President is always there.
The librarians at the Library of Congress always seem to be on the up and up.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee – the only member of the House to vote against Iraq War authorization
Yes. That reminds me of how much our country could use a Barbara Jordan right now.
I think you mean the Afghan War.
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That means the Franken voted against the amendments that provide the authority for some parts of the programs that he says he is OK with.
We deserved a more detailed explanation than what he provided his local TV station.
That means the Franken voted against the amendments that provide the authority for some parts of the programs that he says he is OK with.
Which suggests that the way the authority is being used by the executive branch does not go as far as Congress has authorized.
We certainly have plentiful examples of that recently, such as the administration’s refusal to use the indefinite detention powers Congress has foisted on it.
I trust Al Franken, but I hate that I have to do so.
Reconciling democratic legitimacy with the legitimate boundaries of secrecy is hard. It doesn’t become any easier when there are so many people who have no interest in doing so, and “solve” the problem simply be defining one or the other consideration out of existence.
You know who doesn’t have credibility with me – a couple of Ron Paul supporters with questionable pasts who suck up to the PRC.