Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims

When the NSA revelations were first revealed many of my coworkers said "so?" - thinking they and most citizens had little to hide. My first complaint was that the incredible power this would afford a sitting president (or any political animal in control of the apparatus) would lead to a dismantling on all effective checks on their power in an entirely silent way.

I think the defusing of Petraeus as a future presidential candidate and political player was the first example of this.

In stories like this I never see a discussion of the upside of our elected leaders being monitored. I'm reminded of the show alias where they had a "security section" that monitored everyone, even the head of the secret organization was monitored and subject to repercussions for breaking the rules.

On the face of it, it seems like a good thing for our elected leaders to be monitored to a degree to ensure no outside influence or abuse of power. The threat isn't the monitoring, but the fact that information gathered from monitoring can be used to influence the balance of power. If there were a "sacred wall" between those doing the monitoring and those with political power, such a scenario could work. It's the same concept of separation of powers in the branches of government, or the separation of the three branches of the military: diffusion of power. One group holds all the guns, another group holds all the information. Neither is of ultimate power without the other. Of course we would then need another group or process that could monitor access and usage of information without itself having total access to it.

Of course none of this would justify blanket monitoring of the public at large. But elected officials and those who may potentially be given large amounts of power and trust by the public shouldn't be subject to the same rules.

I expect he "knew about it" in the sense that he knew the CIA/NSA/whomever probably monitors everything they can, and he would likely know that Congressional offices, computers, etc, were not exempt.

I doubt that this particular discussion was of specific interest to Obama.

Given current mode of CIA operations, that does makes a certain twisted brand of sense. They were getting away with monitoring communications of highest echelons of allied nations. Presumably to provide white house and military with up to date info on global state of affairs. From their point of view, why should they not monitor internal affairs to provide white house with clear picture of what is going wrong? Never mind that it is outside of their mandate, legality of surveillance is hotly debated topic right now.

Off course he did.