Why Is Obama Expanding Surveillance Powers Right Before He Leaves Office?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Obama has been immensely pro-mass-surveillance through-out his tenure, what could possibly inspire confidence in this drivel?
In upcoming news: Trump cuts back on emission caps for automakers so the next president cannot cut them back further!
No thanks, that attitude sounds poisonous and dismissive of reality, dismissive of our ability to live and govern and grow and learn.
I voted for Dennis Kucinich that election, a person who did not vote for USA PATRIOT. Many people stood up for human rights and values and real freedom. It wasn't something that took a spine, it's something that takes common sense and compassion and logic.
"VT At-Large Rep. Bernard 'Bernie' Sanders Independent Nay"
Nay: 66
Like Sanders is any kind of special snowflake. You don't have to get socialism to get someone against mass surveillance.
Surveillance expansion continued or even accelerated, as did our endless wars. Obamacare is a Republican proposal even... it's based on Mitt Romney's Massachusetts insurance mandate.
The only shift was in the culture war issues. The Culture War Show is really just a distraction.
Trump won largely by styling himself as an actual alternative. Many people who didn't even like him personally voted for him on the idea that he might be a path out of the conventional corporate statist duopoly.
Personally I doubt it. Look at his picks. I predict that there will be a lot of noise but little actual change. His trolling will be a great distraction.
We've also seen a new season of the Culture War Show begin, featuring a plot involving the epic battle of Red Pill alt-righers vs the social justice warrior league. There will be much arguing on the Internet.
Meanwhile the consolidation of global corporate-state power will continue. Combatants on both sides of the culture war will see an expansion in surveillance and the student loan and mortgage debt indenture system.
This is true. Trump is almost entirely bereft of political philosophy - he was a Democrat until it made sense to be a Republican. He changes policy positions depending on who's asking the question. Sometimes in the same press conference.
A guy like that is not going to make huge changes.
Their beef with Trump is more that he'll do the same things but with no manners and without respect for the 'rules of the game' -- and in that he hasn't kissed enough ass to get to do them so he's a little of a wild-card. Not that he's a crook and they aren't, because they are all crooks.
[ADDITION] And for the suckers on the sidelines, whether on the coasts or "flyover country" (what a dismissive, borderline racist, term, as if those rural people are a subspecies), there's the sideshow of the "cultural wars" (as some other commenter rightly calls them) to keep them occupied with a number of inconsequential crusades pro and against.
Those play into the eternally true fact that people on the rural areas will be a little (a decade or so) slower to adapt to major cultural changes -- so you can exploit the friction politically forever to gather your faithful, dems or reps against the other side.
(Of course those "progressive" city people only take up those issues en masse when they are already settled and tired and safe to identify with (e.g. not many fighting for gay rights in the 70s and 80s, but everybody and their dog do it now when most states have already voted them in, or are about to))
Bullies are always the same type of people, no matter the beliefs.
12333 is an executive order! By its very nature Trump can rescind or update it on a whim the moment he's in office. How can you completely uncritically present readers the argument this is a way to set the rules in stone when they're written on the White House Etch-a-Sketch?
And we of course get the "because 9/11" answer: The origin of these changes dates back, honestly, to just after 9/11. Now more than fifteen fucking years later, days before the guy these Dems all said was an unacceptable fascist threat walks into power, and because 9/11 we had to put the Obama stamp of approval on the "bcc: everyone" model of NSA dragnet surveillance sharing. Gotcha!
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3283349-Raw-12333-su...
IMO this has nothing to do with Trump taking office, and everything to do with giving the NSA even more power before he (Obama) leaves the White House.
/S
Either way Obama set many terrible precedents that will be used.
If you're wondering about the timing, if you assume my premise is correct, to investigate Trump's Russia connections, it's to give them elevated power to investigate that before Trump hampers their ability to do so when in power. He's been openly hostile towards them when they've brought up the connections.
In the broader sense? It's a debate about how much the executive branch should expand surveillance powers, and I'm probably on the same side as you in that respect (privacy is at risk, persecution is a risk if we increase surveillance too much).
Murica!
"It can only be for foreign intelligence, or other enumerated purposes. So it’s not that those agencies will just be able to see whatever they want – it’s that they will be able to request, with particular justifications, access to more raw signals intelligence than they had before."