“We don’t have a domestic spying program” Just incredible . . . [View all]

[bigtree]

Last edited Fri Aug 9, 2013, 10:17 PM - Edit history (1)

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The New York Times ‏@nytimes 28m
N.S.A. is searching through vast amounts of Americans' e-mail & text communications crossing the border http://nyti.ms/16CkkuR


bigtree rant

Almost every government denial of snooping on Americans since 'Snowden' has been met with an even more damaging revelation contradicting them.

The Obama administration is practically begging civil libertarians and other concerned Americans to dig even further into their intelligence activities with a determination for reform. I think it's more of a naivete than arrogance.

All along, the president has operated as if the spooks left over from the last administration - enemies of the constitution who ushered in the present security regime - could be moderated by his apparent concern for civil liberties and privacy rights that he stressed while campaigning for office.

What's occurred, however, by allowing the former Bush cronies to keep their control over policy and operations, Pres. Obama has allowed most of the more objectionable practices and provisions to flourish behind the facade of his own 'reasonableness,' which proponents have always asserted protected Americans from abuses of privacy or constitutional rights.

In defending his own practice, Pres. Obama is obscuring the injustices inherent in both the law and the way the laws are manipulated by agents and operators to overcome almost every obstacle that FISA offers.

By insisting that we can tweak our way to reform; that we can trust that the government will be reasonable and follow good practice in its wide scope of information-gathering, actually does little more than codify the Bush-era premise that government can do whatever it deems necessary.

There will be no leadership to true intelligence reform from the Obama administration, because it's spent almost all of that capital of the president's earlier convictions about civil liberties and privacy rights defending their own unethical and anti-constitutional practices.