Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out

When he made the compromise he did with Hilary during his first election I knew then he was going to be a political creature (and I was behind him).

I don't think Obama will be noteworthy in history outside of being the first black president. Obamacare will not be noteworthy either unless it transforms into something more meaningful.

If you think about it, the praise he gets so often is that he's a "classy guy", that should say something. 8 years in office and him being classy is the thing people think of most when considering him?

Like all previous train drivers Obama did not jump any signals or stop the train to hop out the cab and manually shift the points to get the train on the other track. He did a professional job of steering the train along without running too many people over or derailing the show. His predecessors were generally not as good at these finer details. Perhaps what Obama was best at was doing the announcements over the intercom, the passengers found him to be very funny and charming and all those good things.

Although we are all experts on trains - where they go, what the schedule is and what the seats are like, the reality of the coffee and so on, most of us are utterly clueless about what is in any of those boxes at the side of the track or how it all works.

If I was one of those people that always wanted to be train driver, and, if I had to put together a popular platform to be elected, I could make all kinds of promises, e.g. to floor it at 125 mph and put on some non-stop direct services with some buyable-in-able idea that it would all work out wonderfully. If I knew about the railway and the state of the track, or anything about those grey boxes, then I would not be issuing these cheques that cannot be cashed. Being a 'nice person' would not be enough, clueless me would not be able to take on the constraints of the infrastructure to deliver those 125mph direct trains.

It is easy to be matter of fact in a railway analogy when it comes to the problems of the system, with politics the 'deep state' is the 'problems of the system' and this is best discussed 'matter of fact' rather than as some mumbled conspiracy story.

You are not going to revolutionise transport by being a train driver even if you are the best guy for driving the train. Obama was the best guy for driving the train down the 'deep state' tracks.

She basically stated she wanted to continue Obama's legacy and... in retrospect, Obama's legacy sucks. I voted for him twice, and I almost wish I hadn't. Countries we weren't ever even at war with have children who have now grown up to fear the sound of an American drone. (As a note, I have no issue with use of drones themselves, I have issue with how we use them. Like assassinations without due process.)

The next one might be one to break the above pattern, by being so much worse!

These cautious modifiers -- "I feel", "when you dig into the details" -- wouldn't be necessary if Greenwald's work was ever taken seriously by those in the media who could boost it, but it seems they are too cowardly.

Oh, and we noticed that you got gas here, then had something to eat there, and there were only N minutes elapsed between them. Here is your speeding ticket and DMV record update notification.

So what happens when you stop making the distinction between intelligence agencies and general law enforcement agencies? You get the Gestapo [1], secret police.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo

" However—and this is especially troubling—“if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department,” the Times wrote. So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security. "

That is not "spread further". Given the lack of a warrant and probable cause to initiate the search, prosecution using 'serendipitous evidence' flat out contradicts the 4th amendment.

"so it doesn't increase that power, just spreads it further."

If a thing spreads it must also increase in at least some dimensions.

Therefore he's exploited the unilateral powers given to the executive branch more than any other president in history. So even if Trump does even half it won't seem so bad.

The best part is that he's handed plenty of fuel to any Russian who wants to dismiss their own governments abuse of power by pointing to the US. And they do this at every turn. So despite his tough talk on Russia, Obama has done more to make it easier for Putin to do whatever he wants than anyone.

The problem with a 'good' seeming guy going to such extreme lengths of power is that it legitimizes the bad ones who do it. So the problems should not only be analyzed locally but also considering externalities.

This is why ideological consistency is critical. If you're going to be abusive at least be honest about it. Fortunately we won't have this problem with Trump, he can't help it even when he tries.

[1]Clinton Slams Obama for Voting “for” the PATRIOT Act at ABC-Facebook New Hampshire Debate - https://www.wired.com/2008/01/clinton-slams-o/

We do know Obama (like most presidents) is pretty cozy with the Intelligence Community. We know Trump isn't. I think a coup d'etat or shadow government is too much of a stretch, but this may at least let them work around Trump to an extent.

Also, we're living in interesting times where thoughts like "the intelligence agencies are covertly trying to work around the President!" are actually considered a neutral or good thing by many.

Trump and those sympathetic to him could easily use the power of the intelligence apparatus to punish anyone who opposes him. We've already seen Congress pass a measure allowing them to reduce any federal employee's salary to $1. There's also a bill that would make future federal employees at-will hires that the president can fire. Imagine the climate of fear and intimidation that can be created if the president can fire anyway and has access to a massive surveillance complex that monitor all manner of digital communications.

Now maybe Obama knows something we don't, maybe he knows there really is damning information about Trump out there that just needs to find its way to the right hands. But even if that is the case, a more powerful surveillance state is not going to police itself, nor weaken itself even if Trump gets pushed out.

You have no idea what runs through my head sometimes. No idea. If I ever decide to get "dirty", it won't be to your benefit, in any way whatsoever. If I can't obtain power fairly and rationally, I am very unlikely to use it fairly and rationally. I'll use it to screw you over and make myself and my allies rich on your suffering. That's what people with power do now, and I have observed it to be a successful stratagem so far.

The government is running out of opportunities to present arguments against the possibility of me forming or joining a rebellion composed of strange bedfellows. Every time it changes policy to become more hostile to traditional American ideals, it is prying another board off the portal to the abyss.

Don't tell me to stop watching the circuses and go join one. I'll just nail down the tent flaps and set the big top on fire.

If you don't want me to be a walking time bomb, stop tolerating blatantly unethical behavior in your government and your political parties. Now. For me, it is a beauty contest, and the loveliest of the pageant participants is, at best, a "4". And for some reason, the crown keeps getting taken by someone who is a "1" or a "2".

Perhaps I have just lived too long in places with notoriously corrupt government.

I think you just unboxed jessaustin's point.

I'm no political activist, my expertise lie else where. Surely at least some of us should be able to just vote occasionally.

The US is an Oligarchy. Some people are really angry right now, because their stawperson didn't get elected. But they weren't angry for the past eight years of domestic spying, predator drones and kill lists. This anger only helps solidify the rule of the elite, because it keeps Americans fighting each other, and not the war industry or the banks or various other entities that can basically get their laws passed no matter who is elected.

http://fightthefuture.org/articles/the-fallout-of-american-a...

I really like the EFF, and I'm glad they're fighting for our rights to speech and privacy, no matter which party is in office.

Voting pragmatically in local elections likely still makes sense even for people with extreme views. A few of the races are likely to be close and have candidates with disparate viewpoints.

The problem with a two party system dominated by a president is that many important issues bundled together. Democrats let me down on privacy, but the new Vice President's signature policy focus is persecuting gay families like mine.

I just want to say that we can vote even while agitating within our own parties and social groups for improvements on privacy.

There's still a big reason to vote: pick the candidate with the least amount of problems that has a chance of winning. But I do agree that voting is usually too-little-too-late if you don't already have the majority of voters knowing about your cause.

Voting outside the mainstream over time (for some definition of "substantially outside") can normalize and legitimize viewpoints that would otherwise be regarded as fringe forever. We've seen that with the Green party here in Canada.

That said, I agree (if you think this) that the fetishization of voting for the sake of voting is pretty naive.

That's funny. Reminded me of this: https://twitter.com/sinderbrand/status/819315489021325312

That is the point. Vote is increasingly becoming deselect method (Govt that is least bad) than select.

The US isn't as bad as that very corrupt democracy, but I do not share many people's views that when a country switches to democracy things will improve. There are far too many factors in play, and people voting is only a small factor amongst all of them. The culture of the people probably matters a lot more than whether they get to vote or not.

However, it seems to me that it keeps _individuals_ churning through the powerful offices of state yet ensures that those individuals are only only drawn from a particular _restricted group_.

That's the reason for the animosity to Trump. Within that restricted group he wields more power with fewer ties than other group members.

If he were one of the usual oligarchs who has to compromise with the investment banks and lobbyists for powerful special interests he would be more controllable. But who knows what someone with their own resources might get up to.

No. Nobody wants to live in the iron curtain.

This is an absolute and total failure of leadership, from the Bush administration through the Obama administration. 16 years of inexcusable failure. (It probably goes back even further)

People with bombs have not created fear, politicians have.

Is that why most of it was achieved through executive order?

Actually that's not why people voted for him. Of all the issues people voted on, national security was/is at the bottom of the issues that were important to them.

While he does believe in collecting basic meta data, he supports having judicial oversight and having courts make rulings on when that meta data can be accessed:

http://truthinmedia.com/trump-supports-reauthorizing-patriot...

>> This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.

Actually police militarization goes back to 1981, when Reagan passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cooperation_with_Civi...) which allowed the US Military to co-operate with local law enforcement agencies during the early days of the War on Drugs.

You also have to remember the environment at the time when the flood of cocaine into this country was turning Florida communities in war zones. Remember the 1979 Dadeland Shopping Mall killings?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/10/12/cocaine-cow...

Dadeland did not just represent the year’s 37th and 38th drug homicides. The brazen assassination, at midday, in a mall packed with families and ordinary Miamians, was a worrisome escalation. Miami’s police chief told a friend that he feared the Colombians were turning Miami into Medellín. The shootings also introduced “cocaine cowboys” to millions of Americans and almost overnight gave South Florida a Wild West reputation. A prominent Miami executive, Arthur Patten, told Time: “I’ve been through two wars and no combat zone is as dangerous as Dade County.”

http://flashbackmiami.com/2014/09/10/miami-drug-wars/

The faux-participation model devolved in recent election to shout stuff on online, shout stuff at TV, shout at people listening, and cast vote for one of two scumbags. The real work that got people elected was done by a combination of campaign donors, campaign workers/volunteers, media people, marketing experts, and recently hackers. This collectively filtered the election into a small number of scumbags that voting people chose from. People wanting someone better must get into the groups I listed to help someone better get into that list and stay on it despite smear campaigns. Or use the tactics you mention after election process does what it nearly always does.

Politicians aren't robots, obviously they care more about terrorism than tobacco. And they aren't spending political capital by setting up surveillance, they're gaining it. Obama took huge hits every time he said "ISIS is the JV", "terrorism isn't an existential threat", "chill out everyone". Imagine if he said he was diverting NSA funding to fight the tobacco industry.

Basically, if you don't understand politicians, talk to the people voting for them. The NSA exists because people want it to.

I'm not sure anyone believes that, really. And it isn't required in order to explain the explosion in surveillance.

In my view, it seems that increased surveillance throughout the world is a natural consequence of increased technology. If it's your job to stop crime, why wouldn't you digitize and automate?

The law is the last obstacle, and that is slowly being dismantled.

That's only because we fight against it so hard. If we stopped it would be like Syria or Iraq.

> it doesn't make sense to spend so much

So it's a "victim" of its own success.

All that money we spend is able to reduce it to this level, don't confuse that with it being at this level in the first place.

Hmm. Is mass surveillance a threat to civilization? How many deaths per year?

Like surveillance, the social cost of terrorism can't be measured straightforwardly.

I'm more inclined to fear organized dystopia than random acts of violence, but not everyone feels the same.

And of course most deaths from terrorism in the US are from "mass shooters", who tend to be self-radicalised US nationals with fringe political beliefs.

Needs citation.

- FBI screening has been ineffective (Boston, Orlando)

- FBI self reporting has been ineffective (Ft. Lauderdale)

- Expired Visas (under GWB) has been ineffective (9/11)

- Facebook and Apple Prism programs have been ineffective (San Bernardino)

- TSA fails internal tests. (Richard Reid)

- Russian intelligence agencies reporting to U.S. intelligence agencies has been ineffective. (Boston)

- Enhanced Background and Psychological tests ineffective (Orlando, Charleston)

- Intelligence Briefings have been ineffective (9/11, Richard Reid)

I have my own issues and gripes with him, but I feel that Rand Paul was also one of the few who spoke sanity when it came to all these matters. In the only primary debate he actually participated in, when asked about interfering in Syria, his response was "we've done that how many times now - when has it worked out for us?" which, of course, the populist audience did not like.

Obama has had to make compromises on which issues he's going to push for. The disappointingly slow progress on Guantánamo Bay was an example of this... And that's a single prison camp with a relative handful of people in it. Digital surveillance is an out-of-control monster that all branches of intelligence just want to have more of, as evidenced by this latest decision on data sharing.

I doubt it. Trump has praised NSA surveillance in the past and has hinted that Snowden should be executed. Unless he was just saying such things to try to get the intelligence community on his side pre-election, he's in favor of authoritarian tools.

Not even a half accomplishment considering that there are still 5000 US soldiers in Iraq.

I was 20 in 2008, the first election I could vote in. I was reasonably politically aware at the time but still learning. One of my very basic litmus tests for being a decent, rational person is / was acceptance of gay marriage. I was quite surprised to find that Barack Obama, this liberal phenom who had become a household name overnight, was not publicly supporting such a cut-and-dry issue that would've been barely controversial among his constituency at the time. That was not the sole reason I didn't vote for him, but probably the jumping off point of being more skeptical of his candidacy. Of course, his change of opinion on gay marriage nearly mirrored opinion polls crossing the 50% mark, just like Clinton.

Allowing intel to share the data between each other has absolutely nothing to do with boxing in Trump.

Implicit in a march at the capital is "This many people could be here with torches and guns". By contrast, people clicking online aren't very active.

from what I understand intelligence agencies in some other countries work in this fashion: one agency does the "data gathering" and provides other agencies with information upon request. in theory, this means fewer agencies snooping in your private life and that there is some sort of gate keeper that limits circulation of data based on need-to-know.

so back to my not sarcastic questions: is this a good or bad thing?