DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: sirs on June 08, 2013, 01:51:37 AM
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Obama on Surveillance: If Americans Don't Trust Government, "We're Going to Have Some Problems" (http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/06/07/obama-on-surveillance-if-americans-dont-trust-government-were-going-to-have-some-problems-n1615443)
He's right to a large extent, but I'm not sure framing things this way is quite as virtuosic as he might think:
"If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." Obama added that the National Security agents behind the surveillance programs "cherish our Constitution...You can shout Big Brother or program run amok, but if you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance,” he explained.
The president went on to say the following about the choices we face as a nation: “You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he continued. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society." I agree, but candidate Obama was a persistent critic of his predecessor's wrestling match between security and liberty, frequently labeling it a "false choice." Now he's fully adopted the "choice" paradigm, and is defending it vigorously. What does that choice entail? The United States of America faces grave, innumerable, and constant threats from foes, known and unknown. The men and women tasked with keeping the rest of us alive shoulder that burden every single day. I can't imagine it, frankly. In an increasingly wired (and wireless) world, our best and brightest quietly toil to keep our security tools slightly ahead of technology's cutting edge. Rest assured that our adversaries are doing the same. As a result of these efforts, they've quite literally tapped into a genuinely awesome amount of data. Has access to said data helped keep us safe? It appears so. But is the accompanying widespread loss of liberty -- current or potential -- worth it? My inner libertarian screams, "hell no." By the same token, let's say the president had dismantled or scaled back some of these programs, then we got hit hard again. If it later emerged that the president had done away with intelligence-gathering methods that could have prevented the bloodshed, wouldn't many of us be furious? This is the balancing act to which Obama refers. These are the choices he disdained as a Senator but has since embraced as president.
As citizens, we must decide whether our leaders have chosen wisely. In the case of the NSA 'metadata' gathering, every single one of us is affected, but the contents of our communications aren't monitored. According to people who know what they're talking about, this program -- which spans two administrations and more than a decade -- is a "vital" tool in our arsenal. It makes me uncomfortable, but I'm not sure I oppose it outright. As for PRISM, we're just beginning to learn about that enormous data mining operation. Its ability to review actual content like photos, videos, Skype conversations, and beyond is extremely disquieting. It's the veritable definition of Big Brother. The government tells us PRISM isn't being leveraged to intentionally or specifically target Americans. I want to believe them. But even if they're being mostly truthful, the ways in which PRISM's capabilities could be misused are obvious and frightening. Given the current climate of scandal, abusive targeting, and maddening opacity from the administration, many Americans' capacity to trust the government is being pushed to the brink. For instance, like most Americans, I'm generally supportive of the Pentagon and CIA using drone strikes to take out Al Qaeda leadership, within certain limitations. It's a way to keep us safe and to visit justice upon wanton killers and thugs. But then I read stories like this, and my conscience stirs. I similarly appreciate the president's point that some of the recently-divulged (or re-divulged) programs operate with both Congressional and judicial oversight. That's important. But members of his own party have pointed out that he wasn't fully accurate in his statement and sugges that laws are being violated. I'm momentarily relieved when the president assures us that "nobody is listening" to our telephone calls. But then I recall that no one is actually leveling that accusation. Most Americans are comfortable with the government keeping certain secrets out of the public eye, but that comfort is reliant on a baseline of trust. And that trust is evaporating. Perhaps venerable Washington newsman Ron Fournier captures my sentiments best:
Obama himself channeled Orwell on Friday while defending the secrecy surrounding the spy programs. "Your duly elected representatives have consistently been informed," he said. In other words, trust Washington.Three problems with that logic: Americans don't trust government; an overwhelming majority of lawmakers were never told about the program; and members of Congress who were privy to intelligence "briefings" say their knowledge was limited. Look, it's a dangerous world. Obama and his team need to get their hands dirty to protect us. As terrorists grow more dangerous, we need to consider using the flexibility of the Constitution to adapt. But the mandate to keep Americans safe is no excuse to keep them in the dark.
Fournier concludes that the administration's depth of secrecy and non-transparent spin on a host of issues is lending momentum to the toxic narrative I've been discussing all week. Many Americans, Fourier writes, now view the federal government as "intrusive, Orwellian, incompetent, corrupt, heartless, secretive, and not to be trusted." Indeed. The events of the last month have been a nonstop real-time advertisement in favor of limited, smarter, more restrained federal power.
UPDATE - I think it's important to reiterate a point I made yesterday. The president undercut his rationale for maintaining these programs in his speech at NDU last month. You can't argue that these pervasive measures are necessary, but "large scale" threats are no longer an issue.
UPDATE II - And here's why skepticism reigns:
The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.
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Wasn't the idea of the founding fathers more like: "We're going to have some problems if Americans do trust government."?
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The trick is to use this for security reason. If i recall this system at one time was used to stop porn. I believe it was legal porn. Claiming its all tied together.
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Wasn't the idea of the founding fathers more like: "We're going to have some problems if Americans do trust government."?
Hahahahaha!
Well put.
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Americans do not have to trust government 100%. I doubt that many do trust every government 100%.
We only have to trust that the government we have is superior to what would happen if we had no government at all.
And when some moron says "Government is not the solution: government is the problem", we should recognize him as a moron and never elect him to any public office.
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We only have to trust that the government we have is superior to what would happen if we had no government at all.
And when this standard is not met , what then?
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That standard is met in every real democracy. If you do not have a democracy, then you have no choice anyway.
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No one is arguing the challenging balancing act of security/liberty that must be made by this Government. Nor is anyone arguing that there should be no government. Anyone pushing that nonsense is the real moron. More accurately as the author and Plane were putting it, when you have a government, as in the progression of administration after administration, culminating with the latest most egregious efforts at supposedly "keeping us safe", the ongoing erosion of confidence of government, and their ability to manipulate the system to target those who don't agree with their agenda, can neither be hidden or denied......the mandate to keep Americans safe is no excuse to keep them in the dark.
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Jay Carney: Obama welcomes this debate about programs he tried desperately to keep secret
My mistake. I thought Obama’s comments on Friday meant he was going to drop the insulting “let’s have a debate” deflection strategy he reverts to whenever he’s trying to duck criticism on a tough issue. Here’s ol’ reliable Jay Carney clinging to it amid hurricane-force political winds. The money quote:
“This is not the manner by which he had hoped to have the debate”
Oh? How and when did he hope to have it? Was he planning a big PRISM revelation speech for later this year? As I said in the last Snowden post, the maddening reality of trying to publicly debate the surveillance state is that secrecy condemns that debate to being ill-informed and stupid. We are, as Joshua Foust and Hayes Brown noted today, the proverbial blind men trying to have a debate about an elephant. Obama himself predicted a “majoritarian check” on massive government surveillance in 2001, but you can’t build a majority for your position when your opponent has all the information and you have next to none. Under normal circumstances, O can reveal as much or as little about PRISM as he chooses to favor his own arguments (as you’ve seen him do before with his advisors leaking favorable stuff about the “kill list” to the NYT). That’s the significance of Snowden’s doc dump — it equalizes the debate. A little.
After you’re done with Carney, enjoy this reminder from John Sexton that Obama’s a total fraud on this subject. Exit question: As I write this, a petition on the White House’s website calling on O to pardon Snowden has almost 25,000 signatures. Never mind the foolishness and futility of it; there’s no way Obama will bless massive disclosures of sensitive intelligence material by giving the guy who leaked them a get-out-of-jail-free. If he’s serious about welcoming the debate, though, shouldn’t he at least commute Snowden’s sentence for having started it?
The intelligence community will bristle at leniency, but if Obama wants to do his Captain Transparency shtick, that’s the price he pays. (http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/10/jay-carney-obama-welcomes-this-debate-about-programs-he-tried-desperately-to-keep-secret/)
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I do not see what Snowdon revealed that could be an aid to any enemies. The fact it that Congress debated this stuff pretty much in secrecy, and only now are we learning what they did.
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When did "Congress debate Prism"?
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There was certainly no public debate. There was no participation by the public.
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When did "Congress secretly debate Prism"?
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http://www.gop.gov/bill/112/2/hr5949 (http://www.gop.gov/bill/112/2/hr5949)
Maybe.
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...the authority to acquire foreign intelligence information from non-U.S. citizens outside the U.S
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Obama debating Obama. The face of a true politician......and why the public so distrusts it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8#ws)
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There was certainly no public debate. There was no participation by the public.
When did "Congress secretly debate Prism"?
*cue crickets*
So, it was just made up malarky, as ususal?
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Pushing the envelope, NSA-style
Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts ruled that the Postal Service may record “mail cover,” i.e., what’s written on the outside of an envelope — the addresses of sender and receiver.
The National Security Agency’s recording of U.S. phone data does basically that with the telephone. It records who is calling whom — the outside of the envelope, as it were. The content of the conversation, however, is like the letter inside the envelope. It may not be opened without a court order.
The constitutional basis for this is simple: The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for what’s written on an envelope. It’s dropped in a public mailbox, read by workers at the collection center and read once again by the letter carrier. It’s already openly been shared, much as your phone records are shared with, recorded by, and (e-)mailed back to you by a third party, namely the phone company.
Indeed, in 1979 the Supreme Court (Smith v. Maryland) made the point directly regarding the telephone: The expectation of privacy applies to the content of a call, not its record. There is therefore nothing constitutionally offensive about the newly revealed NSA data-mining program that seeks to identify terrorist networks through telephone-log pattern recognition.
But doesn’t the other NSA program — the spooky-sounding James Bond-evoking PRISM — give you the willies? Well, what we know thus far is that PRISM is designed to read the e-mails of non-U.S. citizens outside the United States. If an al-Qaeda operative in Yemen is e-mailing a potential recruit, it would be folly not to intercept it.
As former attorney general Michael Mukasey explained, the Constitution is not a treaty with the rest of the world; it’s an instrument for the protection of the American citizenry. And reading other people’s mail is something countries do to protect themselves. It’s called spying.
Is that really shocking?
The problem here is not constitutionality. It’s practicality. Legally this is fairly straightforward. But between intent and execution lies a shadow — the human factor, the possibility of abuse. And because of the scope and power of the NSA, any abuse would have major consequences for civil liberties.
The real issue is safeguards. We could start by asking how an Edward Snowden — undereducated, newly employed, rootless and grandiose — could have been given such access and power. We need a toughening of both congressional oversight and judicial review, perhaps even some independent outside scrutiny. Plus periodic legislative revision — say, reauthorization every couple of years — in light of the efficacy of the safeguards and the nature of the external threat.
The object is not to abolish these vital programs. It’s to fix them. Not exactly easy to do amid the current state of national agitation — provoked largely because such intrusive programs require a measure of trust in government, and this administration has forfeited that trust amid an unfolding series of scandals and a basic problem with truth-telling.
There are nonetheless two other reasons these revelations have sparked such anxiety. Every spying program is a compromise between liberty and security. Yet here is a president who campaigned on the proposition that he would transcend such pedestrian considerations. “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he declared in his first inaugural address, no less.
When caught with his hand on your phone data, however, President Obama offered this defense: “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy. .?.?. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”
So it wasn’t such a false choice after all, was it, Mr. President?
Nor does it help that just three weeks ago the president issued a major foreign-policy manifesto whose essential theme was that the war on terror is drawing to a close and its very legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.”
Now it turns out that Obama’s government was simultaneously running a massive, secret anti-terror intelligence operation. But if the tide of war is receding, why this vast, ever-expanding NSA dragnet whose only justification is an outside threat — that you assure us is receding?
Which is it, Mr. President? Tell it straight. We are a nation of grown-ups. We can make choices. Even one it took you four years to admit is not “false.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-pushing-the-envelope-nsa-style/2013/06/13/ac1ecf5c-d45f-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html)