Meanwhile: Obama Opens NSA’s Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community, Just in Time for Trump [1]
1. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-tr...
1. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-tr...
More discussion here - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5o1ovy/with_only...
The Democrats spent 8 years decrying the myriad ways the executive branch violated the Constitution under George W. Then Obama takes power and basically continues or expands nearly all of them, and with only a small handful of exceptions, the Democrats stop caring and forget entirely.
The Republicans spend 8 years decrying overspending and the national debt under Obama, even organizing an enormous 'Tea Party' movement predicated around resistance to it. Then, as Trump is taking power, they rally around a budget that will increase the national debt by 50%.
Ideology is an extremely loose set of guidelines that are only really adhered to in a coherent way by a tiny handful of true believers (folks like Bernie Sanders or Justin Amash). By and large, politics is purely about power -- once you win, all that matters is erasing any past victories claimed by the other party and then doing whatever will please your donors so you can win the next time.
If you believe the article misrepresents the state of affairs, say so -- but whataboutism doesn't cut it. It steers the discussion off course.
Use the "show dead" function to find it.
The long and short of it is that the word is simply a code for pejorative insults.
I mean, if the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Homeland Security weren't in this group of 16, wouldn't the discussion be completely different?
Lastly, who says the minimization that the NSA had been doing itself so far didn't just consist of removing noise? The requests have been and will continue to be confidential after all.
Obama is a proponent of very strong intelligence agencies which certainly must be criticized, but the hysteria and fear-mongering that's happening right now completely misses the issues that have to be solved first, imho.