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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

But why? I don't think Trump has a more privacy-oriented stance on surveillance, so what motivation does Obama have to still rush this in?

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Obama is pro surveillance. Being President got rid of a lot of his initial idealism. Key was killing Osama, which probably cinched him a second term.

Except that, as I understand it, Osama was tracked down using "good ol' fashion HumInt", not surveillance. Obama's attitude toward intelligence gathering has been one of the more perplexing contradictions of his entire administration. All I can figure is there is some trusted figure advising him on these matters who has an agenda of some sort.

I wish it was all conspiracy theory (just like NSA registering your calls, right?) but ibn Laden is known to be death somewhere around 2003 due to kidney failure. He had very serious health issues for many years - sort of issues you most likely die even when taken care of by best doctors in west hospitals, not in caves somewhere in remote mountains in Afghanistan.

Its a matter of time. Shapiro proved Obama birth certificate is fraudulent fake [1] and we know from gossips the photo op from ibn Laden capture was fake (then convenience bury at seat with no photos and whole team 6 conveniently dying on helicopter crash) - its a matter of time when someone somewhere is going to prove it.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/27/obamas-birth...

Where does that link show evidence of a fake? My reading is that the supposed guardians of our democracy failed in executing their due diligence. That's the "powerless" part of the article. I didn't see anything, either explicit, or linked in the article that said it was a fake.

Maybe this better: press conference with LEOs that finished their investigation. You are talking about officers with 20+ years of experience evaluating fraudulent documents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EAxesVQ8wo

I do find that more convincing. Curious why FoxNews National didn't run with that more.

Because to anyone it is an embarrassment that for 8 years USA had a President that wasn't even eligible to be one.

Remember that Obama has access to privileged information we don't. This could go beyond advising. There may be threats that are unsafe to discuss that he sees an urgent need to track down. I've seen many politicians describe the same thing - once they get security clearance, they see all these horrible threats... and it becomes very hard to explain the situation to the public, so they just give up on justifying it.

Except they could say exactly that and none of them do, and over time incidents /can/ be revealed to the public where surveillance was instrumental in stopping terror/hunting down terrorists/preventing attacks but it never has been. Their crowning achievement was locking up a taxi driver who gave to a Muslim charity overseas that spent some of its money on terror.

Don't you think the surveillance boosters would love to provide proof that it actually works while right now all we have is proof of its failures? "Classified" information can be quickly declassified if it helps the public perception of intelligence agencies; Zero Dark Thirty was a propaganda film built on classified intelligence leaked because it made intelligence agencies look good and glorified torture. Incidentally, the people who leaked information for that film were surprisingly not targets in Obama's war on intelligence leakers.

> There may be threats that are unsafe to discuss

Fear porn. Point to the scary unknown as a justification for X.

I tend to think our math teachers were right. If you can't show your work, then didn't do any. (Not an absolute but I lean heavily that way.)

> once they get security clearance

Or it could be that once they get authority, the intelligence community tries harder to scare the shit out of them. There's no way to know if Obama, for example, is getting more legitimate info. I don't buy off on it being safe to assume that he is. If you listened to the intelligence community they'd have you believing that everyone on your block is a lone wolf, bomb wielding, child porn collector. Or that the only reason we haven't had another 9/11 was because of the NSA's phenomenal cosmic power.

Is Obama getting more honesty from the NSA or is he getting more bullshit? We don't know. We only know that he's getting more something. Do you expect the NSA to say something other than "Boss, I'm doing good work"? Are they going to say "um, yeah, so, that big spy network we built... um... it basically doesn't do shit for us"?

The TL;DR is that it's not just the scary details he's getting access to but the high level political shenanigans too.

Because in reality they are all on the same team. This way the new President doesn't have this latest overreach on his hands.

You know, things are simple to understand if we stop believing in fairy tales.

https://twitter.com/WLTaskForce/status/819900557049597953?re...

He's giving intel agencies more power in an attempt to box in Trump.

> ...in an attempt to box in Trump.

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

Well unless proven otherwise I'd just assume it wasn't meant to be particularly political/strategic and leave it at that.

The only potential "anti-Trump move" angle I can see is it directly empowers the intelligence community only. So if Obama is counting on a continued strained relationship between the Trump administration and the intelligence community insiders then this could be it. But I wouldn't personally believe it to be too likely.

>...what motivation does Obama have to still rush this in?

To to give the CIA and NSA more surveillance power over US citizens. Duh.

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