And people still call Snowden a traitor for revealing this kind of practice in 2013.
Maybe the NSA needs to be taken apart or heavily restructured, but this can be done without using their words or us vs them worldview.
It's plausible, but any government evidence to disprove it would be suspect so it's kind of stuck as permanently-epistemologically-ambiguous.
And so I do fully support Snowden but only because the tremendous magnitude of bad behavior he revealed compensates for his treachery in doing so. By contrast I think individuals like "Reality Winner" simply lack ethics. She violated trust on what seemed to have been a very poorly conceived whim to reveal something of relatively minimal benefit to the public good. Indeed checking out the Wiki to see what came of her case I'm rather unsurprised to find that she apparently wrote in her diary of support for Bin Laden and the Taliban. [1]
In military and such organizations this is even more true as individuals take numerous oaths. And one who would break an oath without very substantial reason, is a person the world would be much better off without.
I think the dissonance in your argument is that the US is the people.
Snowden betrayed the intelligence community who is betraying the US.
I think they get away with this because they are just collecting the information in mass and are not targeting an individual.
There was a point where they were only scooping up information on foreign entities, and at some point that shifted and they started collecting all foreign and domestic information. I believe it was right around the time 9/11 happened.
This is what caused William Binney to leave the NSA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
In order to parse that information and look up information about a particular subject or individual, I believe they still require a subpoena, but who is to say someone with access doesn't use this giant trove of information nefariously.
It also opens up the possibility of someone getting blackmail/dirt on a competitor and bribing a NSA employee to get the information.
Also what is to prevent someone from retroactively going back through the information on what used to be allowed but now has changed to being illegal because of an administration change/laws being passed.
The alphabet agencies definitively need more oversight, however I feel anyone tasked with that job ends up becoming entrenched in the corruption and have a hard time holding them accountable.
The United States is like a 243-year-old engine with a desperate need of an oil change.
That oil is us...
...ok. Horrible metaphor but you get it.
Not calling you out just saying just don't let cynicism take hold.
Remember, we pushed Bush out and he was a war criminal.
But never tried him, Rumsfeld or the rest - the only ones who really got a kick to their butts were those implicated in Abu Ghraib. And now you elected a president who not only is a serial liar, probably a sexual assaulter ("grab them by the ..."), but also someone who is involved in multiple lawsuits and probably either unwittingly (the satellite photo) or willingly (the recent whistleblower case) discloses classified information to all of Western enemies.
The party of the President is absolutely unwilling to hold him accountable for his (non)actions as long as they get their abortion bans. And there is no real progress in holding the real deep state (=three letter agencies - not all government employees that don't like the President) accountable and transparent, as evidenced in the original submission.
Of course I couldn't deny there are deeper parts of the state than the Secretary of State
I disagree that the Republican party as a whole wants an abortion ban. The Republican party had control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Presidency, a large chunk of the Judiciary and 5 Supreme Court seats. If they wanted an abortion ban as much as they repeatedly claim they do, they would have it.
If Republicans couldn't run on promises of banning abortions anymore that would substantially impact their voter base. Actually following through on that promise seems a bit like sawing off the branch you're sitting on.
Err I mean... Didn't you hear that GWB is actually a pretty down to earth guy now that he's out of office, and is even friends with Michelle Obama? Who knew he was so personable?
Trump is not president in spite of the problems you have listed - Trump is president because of them. Abortion and how people pee are of the same exact vein - deeply personal topics formed around dividing people. From the perspective of someone supporting Trump, the other team being frustrated is a feature - consider the past 8 years when they were in that position, as told by their media.
Continuing to draw attention to deliberately polarizing topics (as the media does) plays right into the hands of the status quo, by distracting from discussion of longstanding overarching policy (see: bikeshedding). The three letter agencies certainly form their own entrenched interests, but they're also fully supported by the larger economic interests that put on those political races ("propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship"). Specific companies may do better or worse depending on which team wins the race, but they all agree that ever more centralized control is needed. The immediate goal is maintenance of the US economic empire, but it is also insurance for keeping the mobs at bay in the face of rising inequality.
There are plenty of women I have no respect for, in none of those cases has it caused me to even have the urge to sexually assault them.
It's important to keep your objectivity.
It would be interesting to better understand the dynamics between the military and the NSA/CIA/FBI/etc..
I suppose that one good thing that came out of the 2016 election was that it become more obvious that the intelligence services run their own domestic policy, what I don't understand is how monolithic that newish branch of government is.
Technically, the president can classify or de-classify anything they'd like to at any time. He is the sole and only person in charge of the branch of government responsible for this.
Practically, over many years presidents have delegated this authority all over the place, and in such byzantine ways that most of the folks in compartmentalized projects wouldn't know that he had the authority -- and even if they did, they could just point to various laws and signing letters that make it less than clear how a president would go about declassifying anything.
So yeah, in theory POTUS could take an afternoon off, walk down the street into a government building and declassify whatever he wants. That's why we fight so much over who gets the job: the illusion that these powers are present. In reality, however, if he could get the SS to allow him to take a walk (unlikely), he'd be stopped at the door of wherever he went (both by his own and that department's security services), and then the red tape nightmare would begin. By the time it was all over he'd be better off staying home and watching daytime TV.
For what it's worth, and I hate using movies as historical examples, in the movie Nixon there was a great scene where Nixon went in the middle of the night to talk to protesting students. He wanted the war to end too, didn't they know that?
It was contentious, but then one kid got it and said it aloud, something like "You don't have the power to stop it either, do you?"
Nixon looked completely defeated at that moment. Seconds later he was dragged off by his security staff.
Without getting into the veracity of that exchange, the gist of it is something we see confirmed over and over again in the historical record: large groups of administrators simply cannot be governed and instructed by one person, no matter what the documents technically look like. It's system itself that does the work and enforces the norms, whether it's General Electric or the NIS
It's important to make the distinction that while the President doesn't know all of the things that the Intelligence Community is doing at any one time, there isn't anything that he can't know. It's no different in any other part of the cabinet - the Cabinet members and senior executive service all ultimately decide what hits the desk of the President, so in that sense there is an entire staff "controlling what the president knows." Same as any large organization.
The DNI, DIRNSA, DCI, JS/J2 and all service 2's all work for the President, and they collectively are the ones who "know all the things" - so you can bet if he needs to know something, one of those people will give it to him.
If he knew that "something" even exists!
A former civilian nuclear war planner, I think while working for RAND, learned about the existence of the US military plan for the actions involving nuclear weapons: the plan specified the amount of nuclear response to any conflict, which is fundamental for anybody who has the power to resolve conflicts (a president) to know.
But the civilians weren't allowed to know that the plan even existed: the planner also learned that no other civilian, including the people around the president and the president himself, even knew that the said plan existed: it's very existence was being actively hidden from "civilians." They also had a method for delivering them "something else" if the "civilians" asked "about" that topic.
The military managed for years to operate (to be trigger ready) on the plans they kept completely hidden from anybody, including the president.
The president or anybody around him had explicitly no chance to get that by their own initiative.
Everything nicely documented in the book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner." Read it and weep.
Presidents usually have the same clearance as the highest clearance.
> the president does not have a right to know everything
This is true, clearances are need-to-know compartmentalization. I was only briefed on stuff required for my job... and would often be told something was outside of scope.
FWIW, the founders didn't intend for presidents to have nearly as much power as they have today.
Perhaps you can research intelligence operations during the Revolutionary War to glean some of their thoughts on how intelligence and the intelligence community should be set up. Of course, I don't know if our founding fathers were burdened with the task of maybe or maybe not covering up the existence of UFO's. :)
It's a bit reminiscent of North Korea's daily news blasts showing fabricated footage of how miserable life in SK and USA is. Probably not as extreme a slant going on here, but there's an awful lot of anti-Russia sentiment floating around with no readily apparent basis in fact.
Because the Chinese are off limits now (because the studios want to make money there and throwing evil Chinese billionaires into your rotation for super-villain of the month is a great way to not do that) so that basically leaves Russian billionaires and middle eastern oil moguls as your two picks for low effort evil foreign characters.
Further, the 'gag order' component should be temporary and of minimum necessary duration. The arrest of a target should automatically invalidate the gag order because keeping this information from the defendant is a violation of due process.
Good way to go to prison for a long time, but one person's success could force the system to overhaul.
IC Oversight [1] is a massive and well known program, which requires extensive yearly training from every IC member and even more from supervisors and executives.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...