Trust the professionals. They'll strike the right balance
by digby
I just listened to the president blather on about how nobody's listening to anyone's phone calls, despite the fact that this has not been alleged by anyone. And he assured us that he has no worries about having his own phone tapped when he's out of office because the people who are doing all this are professionals and he trusts them. So that's good.
But here's what's been going on:
We don't know a lot about how the government spies on us, but we know some things. We know the FBI has issued tens of thousands of ultra-secret National Security Letters to collect all sorts of data on people -- we believe on millions of people -- and has been abusing them to spy on cloud-computer users. We know it can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant. We also know that the FBI has been intercepting cell-phone data, all but voice content, for the past 20 years without a warrant, and can use the microphone on some powered-off cell phones as a room bug -- presumably only with a warrant.
We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames like Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime -- deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what's really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computer facility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.
We know that the DHS is also collecting a massive amount of data on people, and that local police departments are running "fusion centers" to collect and analyze this data, and covering up its failures. This is all part of the militarization of the police.
Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awareness program? It didn't die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs. We know that corporations are doing an enormous amount of spying on behalf of the government: all parts.
The president said today that he 'welcomes" this debate and that's really great. Except for one thing. His administration has kept all of these things secret:
We know all of this not because the government is honest and forthcoming, but mostly through three backchannels -- inadvertent hints or outright admissions by government officials in hearings and court cases, information gleaned from government documents received under FOIA, and government whistle-blowers
In today's press conference he said this:
I will leave this office at some point. And after that i will be a private citizen. And I would expect that on the list of people who might be targeted so that somebody could read their emails – I'd probably be pretty high on that list. But I know that the people who are involved in these programs... They're professionals.
In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance.
Apparently, the "right balance" includes an unprecedented crusade to punish whistleblowers and intimidate the reporters who revealed what we've been able to piece together:
It's a little bit hard to believe that he "welcomes" a debate about all these programs he's gone to such great lengths to keep a secret.
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