Media unhappy with Obama’s FISA abuse
It started yesterday when the New York Times‘ editorial board disclosed their displeasure with the latest scandal to hit the Obama Administration when it was revealed that the NSA was trolling everyone in the rolls of Verizon users.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
Yeah, everyone was worried that the Bush Administration would abuse their FISA powers, but then the Obama Administration comes along and just does it. There’s no real reason for it, it’s not “protecting America” as Dianne Feinstein said yesterday. We’ve all seen that, in the cases of Nidal Hasan and the Boston bombing brothers, even when the Feds have information to prevent terror attacks they won’t act on it.
This morning the Washington Post, the sycophantic media arm of the Obama Administration turns on their masters, sort of;
In the days after the Boston bombings, many asked why the government didn’t connect the dots on the Tsarnaev brothers. Now, many are asking why the government wants so much information about so many Americans. The legitimate values of liberty and safety often compete. But for the public to be able to make a reasonable assessment of whether these programs are worth the security benefits, it needs more explanation.
Oh, by the way, if you’re feeling safe and secure because you don’t use Verizon, the Washington Times says that Verizon isn’t the only carrier that was subject to the data collection;
A former NSA employee, William Binney, said other phone companies’ records have been seized routinely by the agency. USA Today reported in 2006 that three phone companies — Verizon, Bell South and AT&T — had been turning over data on Americans’ domestic phone calls to NSA, though lawmakers told the newspaper then that the companies’ cooperation was only partial.
Oh, yeah, Attorney General Holder wouldn’t tell the investigating committee yesterday whether they had been monitoring Congressional phone traffic.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden
Time to shut down these programs and start throwing those responsible for them in jail, regardless of political allegiances.
This government has turned on it’s own citizens and has become a hair’s breadth away from a police state. It must not, and cannot be, tolerated.
Hey America, you re-elected this tin-plated fascist clown, now it’s time to enjoy the ride…
I’m happy to see that the media are finally waking up (sort of) to what is really going on.
It wasn’t so long ago — the Nixon-Vietnam era, in fact — that phones were tapped and you could tell that yours was tapped by the sounds on the line.
Nice to see the shoe is on the other foot for them now.
The irony in the fact that they very well might have been monitoring congressional phone calls LOL
These politicians are a joke. This administration is an even bigger joke. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have already rolled over in their graves and started digging a hole to China out of shame to what Barry O has had a hand in doing to this great nation.
smdh at the politicians.
@2 here here, they got what THEY wanted.
Libs be careful what you wish for.
5 Do you think Romney would have done any different? Or how about Cain, Bachmann, Santorum, Perry, or Gingrich? Until laws are put in place against this sort of thing, the executive branch will abuse this power with impunity, and that’s true irrespective of what party holds that branch.
Former 11B: actually, I don’t think Romney would have had his folks use a “vacuum-cleaner” approach to collecting domestic telephone call records. Nor do I think the others you name above would have done so.
Unlike the political left, conservatives tend to pay more than lip service to the concept of individual liberties and Constitutional rights.
Holder should be in prison and Obama should be impeached.
@ #6: No, actually, I can’t imagine any on your list (even McCain) hiring hundreds of thousands of union thugs throughout the executive branch whose only purpose is to cause destruction of the fundamental rights of all Americans starting with everyone who is not progressive enough as they define it.
We are in this mess because the party driving the destruction had at least the cooperation of the other party. It could not have gotten this bad without it. Sure, some measures were taken to slow the process (it has taken 100 years to get us here instead of 30), but significant erosion of our liberties was allowed and in some cases encouraged by the very folks who should have stopped it.
My in-laws are Cambodian immigrants who escaped the Khmer Rouge. When me and my wife were first dating, she said she voted for Obama in 08. When I told her why I was against the glorious leader, she said, “Wow, you sound like my Dad, only in English.”
So I pointed out to her that her father has seen what happens when socialists take over, especially when they promise the world. It starts out with sunshine and bunnies, then the KGB/Stasi show up at your door one night, then it’s gulags/killing fields/Katyn Forest, while everybody who’s not an “enemy of The People” has to beg for something as basic as toilet paper. She has come around since then (I even got her to start liking guns!), but every time something like this comes out, I still tell her, “See? This is how it starts! Ask your Dad where this crap usually leads!”
The Patriot Act was an overreaching piece of legislation in the first place, but the rush to grab data was so important it ended up being a bipartisan violation of some of our basic concepts regarding privacy and such.
This current data collection might not be all that evil, but like everything done in secret it appears evil even if it’s not. I am going against my own normal positions and wondering if this massive data collection is more of an attempt to find an algorithm that understands “normal” phone activity as practiced by us on a daily basis, much like cookies used to track internet behavior. Without a model of “normal” daily chatter finding the abnormal becomes hard to specify and quantify…I am wondering it this data collection lets them use a mathematical formula to identify “abnormal” activity, more like we are the control group than the target group.
If that were so it would sure be nice if they just said that instead of the way they went about it, because the way they went about it does indeed smell like sh1t, and I think we all know if it smells like sh1t it tends to be sh1t….
The press is only upset because the fiction of a neutral press is now subject to full exposure by a disgruntled government employee. Those late night phone calls from political operatives of both parties, and the JournoList collaboration are subject to blackmail. Well, if America had a sense of ethics. Larger question may be to discuss the definition of ‘treason’ and how to handle traitors. There are a large number of Americans who love the luxuries of America and hate the hardships of living elsewhere, but truly hate America and Americans who still believe in the vision of the Founders. Harry Reid leant support to AQ and the Taliban with his unilateral declaration of surrender. As a Senator, laws do not apply to Reid – only the rules of the Senate which Reid controls. Code Pink and similar groups actively work against protecting America, only getting press when a republican is in power; and, so groups actively subvert the law by shuttling deserters to Canada and other measures. We have many foreign nationals – whether here illegally or legally, and Americans who have never, and will never assimilate into American society. Multiculturalism leads directly xenophobia, and from there to domestic terrorism on many levels. Before becoming a murderer, Hassan Nidal was Muslim-American who enlisted in the Army and rose to the rank of Major. There are other groups, like La Raza actively working to undermine America and give the southwest back to Mexico (Mexico won’t take it back). By promoting multiculturalism, we have created an enemy Other. Are these Other traitors considering we’ve allowed them to never be American? But, Republicans in Congress objected to Obama’s undeclared, unauthorized war in Libya. By Obama’s destruction of the War Powers Act, any future president can go to war at any time and never work with Congress. This breaks the Constitution – is Obama a traitor? Are the Republicans for demanding adherence to the Constitution? Are the American pilots who followed orders that broke the law? Today “traitor” is defined by political persuasion, not by deeds. Our Founders allowed for anyone to say… Read more »
7 Interesting that you think that, considering that similar data collection occurred during the Bush administration. Am I to understand that Bush is not considered a conservative?
There are a lot on both the left and the right who pay lip service to civil liberties. There are also a lot on both sides who actually mean what they way about them. We can sit here all day and give examples of both, but that’s largely pointless. I don’t trust either side to do the right thing vis-à-vis civil liberties, and until some serious protections are put into place, neither should anyone else, even if it’s the party of their choice running the White House.
Former 11B: please provide evidence of this type of wholescale, “collect it all and sort it out later” collection of such data domestically during the Bush administration.
I don’t believe you can. I’m pretty sure this latest little “escapade” of “vacuuming data” domestically started well after Jan 2009.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database
Enjoy.
#15: according to your link, the program was set up by Clinton and went operational under Bush-43.
Blaming Bush proves Obama is Bush’s Bitch.
Here’s the original article from LAST year that explains about all of the data the NSA is collecting, a very scary picture:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
And here’s an article from yesterday that describes the PRISM project and all of the data collected through that program:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story_1.html
In short, they are collecting all data on everyone and creating super fast supercomputers to sort through it all.
Unless you’re communicating on bits of paper and only using cash, your data has been collected and is available to the NSA.
@ #17: There are also ways for the consumer to skew the data that they collect. Lots of folks do not have the luxury of doing so, but really, using mostly cash can seriously confuse the collectors about just what we consume.
I have thoroughly enjoyed using a card for things like dog food and organic veggies, for instance. If you think about it, you really can paint whatever picture of yourself that you want them to see.
DaveO, where did I blame Bush for this? Kindly, copy and paste whatever I wrote that makes you think that I believe this to all be his fault.
I’m with Former 11B on this – had Romney won, he’d have been told how this is critical to national security, and without this the terrorists will be able to conduct nefarious plots on US soil and kill Americans. Scary pictures are painted, and not going along with this makes you look soft.
Ultimately, this is the problem – it’s not a D or R thing, it’s that our politicians are .. well, they’re politicians. They live for getting re-elected in a reactionary society. If a terrorist attack happens and it comes out something like this could’ve stopped it, and they voted against it, they’re vilified.
I don’t fault the NSA – they *should* be trying to push the bounds of what they can do. That’s their job. It’s the job of the elected politicians to ‘push back’ and keep things in check. In that, they routinely fail and hopefully this latest revelation will start changing things. Yes, I’m overly optimistic.
@Hondo: I’m reading up on some of this now, and the EFF has a timeline, with links to articles, and a good deal of this does appear to have happened during the Bush Presidency as well. It seems to have been expanded more recently, of course, but ‘tens of millions of [American] phone call records’ in 2006 does indict the Bush administration on the same thing. Unless we’re contending there are tens of millions of AQ sympathizers they were tracking?
Here’s the EFF link, and the specific example I mention above is below it:
EFF: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline
2006: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm
That’s just one article, too – you’ll find others on the same site.
Here’s a story that says our dear and glorious leader tells us “Don’t worry. Be happy. No one is listening to your phone calls. So don’t worry. Be happy.”
http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653378/s/2cfc0d2d/l/0Lusnews0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A60C0A70C188249410Eobama0Enobody0Eis0Elistening0Eto0Eyour0Etelephone0Ecalls0Dlite/story01.htm
The correct response is: ‘Nobody believes you.’
There are some in the media who are now at least confused about where their loyalties are supposed to be. Good.
21, as technology improves it will become easier for governments with access to that technology to monitor communications of private citizens. Things have been heading in this direction for ages and the only way to stop it in this country is to make it illegal. This program would have happened regardless of Dole/Clinton Bush/Fort or Kerry and so on.
Americans who value privacy and civil liberties need to stand together in opposition to this, regardless of where they happen to be on the political spectrum.
Gore not fort. Damn autocorrect.
Looks like I might have been wrong about when this effort began. Thanks for the info.
It does, however, appear to have greatly expanded in the last 4 1/2 years.
I automatically ignore anything that anonymous and/or former 11b post. They are the classic leftist poser that posts partial truths or those of dubious veracity.
In the cases of Obama, and his administration, there is nothing that anyone should post in defense of them. They have gone beyond the pale and the only thing that any true American should ever desire to hear from Obama, or any of his administration, is their statement that they are resigning their post(s) effective immediately, and that arrest warrants for them have been issued.
I had issues with some things that W had done, bu I will never believe a word that issues from Obama or anyone in his administration until I see it in effect with my own two eyes.
In fact, I have reached the point that I would have no problem with stripping the citizenship away from, and deporting, anyone who, in any way shape or for, defends Obama or anyone in his administration.
ALL of them are living definitions of treason and need to be shipped away from this nation at the earliest possible time.
@27: What partial truth did I post? I gave Hondo links, with sources, that showed the collection of tens of millions of phone call records happened under the previous Presidency. I also stated that it most certainly did expand during the Obama administration. That makes me a ‘leftist poser’?
I defend the current administration on some things, but haven’t done so on this. While I recognize that the IC needs to have tools at their disposal, I think we’ve focused so much on the threat of terrorism that we don’t see the threat of eroding liberties – ones which quintessential to American life. The Obama administration went too far with this.
I love this country. I love what we stand for. And I find it a tad ironic that you say I should be stripped of my citizenship and shipped away as a traitor to the country because *sometimes* I defend the democratically-elected administration. See, to me, things like free speech and democratic elections are part and parcel to the American way of life.
You feel differently? No problem. I still support your rights, even if you think mine should be stripped away.