Obama said the NSA wasn’t “actually abusing” its powers. He was wrong
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Greenwald has been writing about the total ineffectiveness of judicial checks on state power for over a decade, primarily since Bush vastly increased executive branch reach and began using the state secrets privilege as a protective shield, crippling the ability for courts to properly prevent abuses.
See "Elimination of judicial check on executive power" on Wikipedia, citing an article from 7 years ago (2006):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#Elimin...
It seems people are just beginning to pay attention to what Greenwald has been warning us about for a long time.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/q-a-senator-ron-wy...
When Congress wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, I suppose they could have found some way to keep its details a secret, so that Soviet agents wouldn't know what the FBI and NSA's authorities were. But Congress made that law public, because it's a fundamental principle of democracy that laws should be public all the time, and every American should be able to find out what their government thinks the law means.
The FISA court is arguably the most bizarre court in the United States. This is the only court I know of that is structured to hear essentially one side – it comes from the government. A group of judges operating in complete secret and issuing binding rulings based solely on the government's arguments have made possible the sweeping surveillance authorities the public only found out about [recently.] What's noteworthy is there has been nobody there to argue the other side, and that is what we want to change. This court has to be reformed to include an adversarial process where arguments for greater privacy protections can be offered alongside the government's arguments for greater surveillance powers. It should have a selection process that produces a more diverse group of judges, and a process to ensure that its important rulings are made public so that American people can understand exactly what government agencies think the laws allow them to do. It was a lack of protections like these that allowed secret law to persist for so many years.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/court-ability-to-poli...
PHOTOS of the 12 FISA Court judges. 11 of the 12 were appointed to bench by Bush or Reagan.
Only one man appoints judges to the FISA Court - Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/meet-the-foreign-inte...
As are the vast majority of the "threats" we are suppose to give up our freedoms for. We live in a "what if" society.
Was he just wrong because he just didn't know?
Or was it much worse in that he knew and was outright lying?
Because I would honestly like to really know.
We'll never know how much Obama is involved in all of this, but another possibility would be that the masses simply don't care much about facts and believe the words spoken by what seems to be a competent authority in the matter, especially one they voted for. Ask regular people what they think about this whole deal, you'll have a revelation.
This is damage control, plain and simple.
Obamas actions in the near future will reveal all. If he was lied to and deceived, he will apologize publicly and he will reign down vengeance on those who lied to him (unless he is completely spineless and incompetent, which I don't believe he is).
On the other hand, if he knew all along these revelations will simply be played down and it will be business as usual in Washington, DC (although the NSA will probably not make the "mistake" of tapping Washington DC calls instead of Egypt again).
When I've watched him being questioned sharply in news conferences he takes it personally. He doesn't like to be challenged by reporters. He has a large enough ego where he could very easily think he has the upper hand and wouldn't be caught.
If he didn't know, then the most powerful spy agency in the world was disobeying an elected official. Given the control they could exercise over officials via say black mail (just think what Anthony Wiener would have done to avoid those pic's coming out earlier or Petraeus to avoid his affair being known), this is really scary.
I think anyone just skipping over this bit here really needs to stop and consider more closely the magnitude of this completely true astute observation.
While on one hand it's a bit of a side show to argue about this, it's also far more likely that people in general will see the problem if they see officials repeatedly being wrong or outright lying about abuses than to get them to accept there's an issue with "just" collecting the data.
The "just" collecting the data part of the problem is rarely seen as an issue with those who largely trust the government, as it is hard to get them to understand that even if the current government is ok, things can go rapidly downhill as they tend to write off any examples as too extreme or "can't happen here".
The best way of reigning this in, is unfortunately to focus on any too close for comfort abuses. E.g. if one found NSA staff stalking ex'es would likely get a far more furious response than NSA staff collecting data about large swathes of the population.
Which does imply a troubling level of ignorance and/or misplaced trust, but is not necessarily on par with the NSA gone rogue or the President being a dupe or stooge.
Oh please give me a break. This is the worse they could come up with, a typographical error that produced large swaths of unusable data for analysts? Seems like a normal part of any computer systems: a typo will cause unintended consequences.
Sensationalist reporting and blatant exploitation of minor plot twist shouldn't make it to any serious news outlet, let alone HN. Let's keep it serious guys.
The reason it occurred is meaningless. The _fact_ that it occurred should have been reported.
I think that's an important distinction and perhaps the point Obama was making.
It's possible that he was misinformed by his advisers and indeed did not actually know. But I am not optimistic about that notion.
The first thing that matters is the result. And it continues
a) to be unacceptable, and
b) to not be addressed
Or, put another way: I hear you inadvertently spilled water on your wife at the dinner table last night; tell me, for how long have you been abusing her?
An internal audit by an agency that routinely fails to report "mistakes" to the people responsible for their oversight, and who routinely instructs staff to alter information before it is handed over, and which has previously been found to instruct staff in how to "shore up" justifications for their searches, "only" finds unintentional violations of the law.
What a shock.