Cry me a river. The widespread adoption of encryption wouldn't have been such a pressing issue if spy agencies like the NSA hadn't been abusing their powers by conducting mass surveillance on law abiding citizens.
Blame NSA, or whoever, all you want. They serve at the pleasure of their customer.
Edit: I'm in an exceedingly grumpy mood today. :-/
I want to revisit the earlier point in your context. You say that it goes back 15 years. You are right.
Each of these parties is jointly and severally liable for it. Obama is currently liable. I think it's just and right to criticize him for failure to act. His lack of fortitude is not excused by the lack of fortitude of others.
That said, Obama is clearly in favor of surveillance.
The other theory I've seen is that people in power are used to having their life scrutinized publicly, so personally don't really care about privacy, so are the worst people to making decisions about such things.
Ideally, you want to be able to say well "where it not for the other guy we would have implemented my solution!" Which creates huge pressure based on how bad things look vs. how they actually are.
Just like he ordered the military to let homosexuals join.
Unless the Bush era laws says the NSA MUST spy (and they don't), he is pretty much clear to order them not to spy.
The president has never been the one pulling the strings, and I'm not sure why everyone blindly blames the person in that position.
There are people whose names the general public has never seen that have a great amount of influence in our legislative process.
The checks and balances system is nice, preventing a situation in which a depressed or cranky president launches a war "just because"...But there are a lot of other less direct ways that his personal state of being could drastically affect the entire country. What if the senator who is a leading advocate for surveillance reform personally insulted the president's family? Sure, the senator's a jerk, and the president would never admit to basing his decision to ignore the senator on such a personal slight. But if such personal hostility resulted in the president putting the senator much lower on his priority list...such that he never gets around to giving the issue the proper amount of attention...The impact on the country is virtually the same as if the president's reaction had been, "Fk that d-bag and everything he stands for"
This is just a long way of saying, yeah, kind of crazy how so much of what affects us as a society is in the hands of one human being, and it's unfair to blame him for not being able to control everything. And yet, he is the one who signed up to have those powers...criticizing him is not just a reflexive tendency to scapegoat, but the current "user-friendly interface" we have with our bureaucracy.
While Obama is in charge, Democrats apologize for him and Republicans blame him personally for destroying the country.
The truth is, the president is never the one pulling the strings (at least not all of them), but both sides insist it's the case when it's to their advantage to attack strawman positions of the incumbent party.
This power is pretty overrated.
How often have you turned on the TV and seen a network cover the entirety of one of Obama's speeches/press conferences, other than a major speech like the state of the union? Usually they cut away to something else after a little while or don't cover it at all, except maybe on a morning show.
Non-TV media generally cares even less.
Get on TV every single night, spread awareness about what's happening there, tell US citizens that we need to lead by example, and use the propaganda machine to create positive change, for once.
More importantly there's a limited amount of political capital you have as POTUS. While you may think Obama should have directed more of this to closing Gitmo, I think the big ticket accomplishments he spent that political capital on such as ACA were more important.
And it's not clear at all that Obama could have successfully closed Gitmo even had it been a higher priority of his. It is clear that he immediately ended interrogative torture [2] and made efforts to close it. There's still force feeding but that's also an issue in us prisons so closing gitmo and sending the detainees to other prisons is not necessarily solving anything there.
[1] one early study here: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-obamacare-w...
And Gitmo was just an example, not necessarily saying it would even be at the top of my list. Of course sending the detainees to other prisons is not the answer. These people need to be freed, now. Same deal with the multitude of other US military prisons and CIA black sites.
He hasn't had the power to do a lot of things but that hasn't stopped him from shredding the constitution and using executive orders to override his own legislation that passed into law did it?
People want to say he doesn't have these powers, but even a cursory look at how he's been running his office is in direct conflict to the statement.
As for the first sentence, what are the examples of his orders that are shredding the constitution? Does SCOTUS (final authority on constitutional law) agrees with your assessment?
It doesn't matter how many orders he's issued, but the overall effect of constitutionality.
>> what are the examples of his orders that are shredding the constitution?
First you have to understand what executive orders can't do. They cannot make laws and they cannot stop laws from being carried out.
- This means his executive order to delay the employer mandate - but only for certain businesses. He said he will not enforce the mandate for businesses with 50-100 employees, but will enforce it for business with more than 100 employees.
THAT is effectively writing new a law. Congress said it starts at 50, but Obama says it starts at 100. By the constitution, only congress has this power, not the POTUS.
- Another example is his changes to the DACA act to include illegals who entered the country before 2010. Again, this is not something he has the power to do. By actively not enforcing exiting laws, and then creating his own set of criteria on who can stay in the US and who cannot, he's subverted the existing immigration laws and replacing it with his own.
- Another good example is how he said that person or business that doesn't support LGBT nondiscrimination cannot receive a business contract with the government. This means if a Muslim doesn't want to bake a cake for a gay couple, the government has the right to refuse to do business with them.
I won't even start with how unconstitutional such a law would be if it was passed by congress. Considering this is already protected under the Free Exercise Clause of the first amendment which states no citizen can be required to forfeit their right to do business with the federal government.
Again, only congress has the ability pass a law like this, but Obama did so anyways.
This is the issue with his orders. It has nothing to do with how many orders he's making, it's how he's using them. Effectively creating or overriding existing laws as he sees fit - something the POTUS should not have the power to do.
As for your examples, I am not a constitutional scholar, neither is you. Right now they are just your opinions. For instance, Free Exercise Clause does not mention right to do business with the federal government. I'll wait for SCOTUS interpretation of the clause rather than yours.
This is false. Government agencies largely are creations of statute law, and their existence is governed by Congress. The heads of agencies (and top-ranking subordinate officers to a certain level) often serve at the pleasure of the President, but the agencies themselves do not exist at his pleasure.
In most cases where the agencies that are not created by statute are subordinate to those that are, those subordinate agencies still do not exist at the discretion of the President, they exist under the statutory authority of some officer of the statutorily-created agency to which they report. (That officer may serve at the pleasure of the President, so the President could fire them for not acting as he wishes with respect to the subordinate agency, but the agency itself does not exist at the discretion of the President.)
There are exceptions -- subordinate organizations not created by statute within the Executive Office of the President, for instance -- but generally federal government agencies do not exist at the discretion of the President.
Heck, even doing this through a back-door approach by refusing to spend Congressionally-appropriated funds in order to kill a program has been ruled unconstitutional; Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35 (1975).
I don't know what the legal status is now, but the NSA's origin sounds kind of like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#World...
"The agency was formally established by Truman in a memorandum of October 24, 1952, that revised National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 9.[28] Since President Truman's memo was a classified document,[28] the existence of the NSA was not known to the public at that time."
Here is that memo, according to the NSA: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/truman/truman_memo.pd... It seems odd to me in talking about the "Director of the NSA" instead of the agency itself, but what do I know.
[0] https://legcounsel.house.gov/Comps/National%20Security%20Age...
"Independent agencies of the United States federal government are those agencies that exist outside of the federal executive departments (those headed by a Cabinet secretary). More specifically, the term may be used to describe agencies that, while constitutionally part of the executive branch, are independent of presidential control, usually because the president's power to dismiss the agency head or a member is limited."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
The NSA isn't an independent agency, it's a part of the US military chain of command under the Department of Defense and hence is under the direct control of the Command in Chief. The head of the NSA is always an active enlisted officer who is part of the of the joint chiefs (Admiral/General ;)) and is also the commander of the US Armed Forces Joint Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
The NSA's existence, as well as some particular details of officers that it must have and its functions and duties, are mandated by Congress in Statute; see the National Security Agency Act of 1959 (and subsequent amendments thereto.) That it is within the military chain of command doesn't change this; Congress's power to do direct the structure of the military is an enumerated power in Article, Section 8. The designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief does not make the President unreviewed dictator of the military, it simply restricts Congress power over military organization such that the Congress cannot place authority to command the military within the regulations adopted by Congress in some other person than the President.
Congress's power to direct the existence, function, organization, and funding of agencies -- and the President's lack of Constitutional power to disregard Congress's directions on those matters and disband statutorily-mandated programs and agencies -- is not, contrary to your description, restricted to independent agencies. It absolutely does extend to federal executive departments, including the Department of Defense.
The NSA is the only Agency that it's mission is dictated by the Executive Branch.
The NSA's existence, as well as some particular details of officers that it must have, etc., are mandated by Congress in statute; see the National Security Agency Act of 1959 (and subsequent amendments thereto.) That it is within the military chain of command doesn't change this; Congress's power to do direct the structure of the military is an enumerated power in Article, Section 8. The designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief does not make the President unreviewed dictator of the military, it simply restricts Congress power over military organization such that the Congress cannot place authority to command the military within the regulations adopted by Congress in some other person than the President.
Congress's power to direct the existence, function, organization, and funding of agencies -- and the President's lack of Constitutional power to disregard Congress's directions on those matters and disband statutorily-mandated programs and agencies -- is not, contrary to your description, restricted to independent agencies. It absolutely does extend to federal executive departments, including the Department of Defense.
> The head of the NSA is always an active enlisted officer who is part of the of the joint chiefs
No:
(1) The Director of the NSA is always an active commissioned officer (and a four-star flag officer during the tenure in the position.) Commissioned officers are not enlisted personnel.
(2) The Director of the NSA is not a member of the Joint Chiefs -- the Joint Chiefs of Staff include the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Chiefs of Staff of each service (Chief of Staff of the Army, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Chief of Naval Operations, Commandant of the Marine Corps, and the Chief of the National Guard Bureau.) The Director of the NSA is Chief of the Cyber Security Service, but not every position with the word "Chief" in it in the military is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This Executive Order:
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execut...
can be changed at any time and to whatever the President desires it to be. He could change it this afternoon if he liked.
[edit: in case it is unclear, I am saying that cybercrime is as strong reason for individuals to use ubiquitous encryption as government snooping not that it is a justification for government snooping]
The NSA is only as "bad" as the rest of the government, it's not a rogue agency that whisks people in the middle of the night to re-education camps, if the US ever becomes such state then encryption isn't going to help you.
This isn't an argument against encryption, or in favor of the NSA violating the privacy of US citizens (I am not a US citizen and I do not expect the NSA to care for my privacy) it's just an argument that people should put things in perspective.
East Germany didn't became a police state because of the Stasi, they've created the Stasi to enforce it. The US wasn't turned into a police state because of McCarthy-nism, it wouldn't turn into one because of the NSA even if they continue to violate the rights of US citizens unless there will be a major major political shift across all branches of the US government and it's population.