Posted on 01/18/2018 2:28:09 PM PST by nickcarraway
Back in 2005, The New York Times reported that President Bush had been lying through his teeth about a warrantless wiretapping program his administration had set up under the NSA. The baldly illegal program required participation from telecom companies, who were thus exposed to millions of lawsuits from their spied-on customers. Bush urged Congress to pass a bill granting the telecoms retroactive immunity, prompting outrage from Democrats, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, who promised to filibuster any bill with such an immunity provision in October 2007.
But Obama blatantly broke his promise, not only failing to filibuster the bill, but actually voting for it. That act laid the groundwork for an incomprehensible move last week by key Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff, to vote against an amendment requiring the NSA to get a warrant before spying on American citizens. (It is worth emphasizing that at this very moment, Donald J. Trump is the president of the United States.) It's just the latest bitter fruit from Obama's wretched civil liberties legacy.
Of course, Obama's bait-and-switch on telecom immunity was only the first step in his civil liberties record. As the Snowden documents showed, as president he embraced and in some ways expanded the Bush spying machine. His NSA used ridiculously expansive readings of legal language, data-swapping with allied surveillance programs, and straight-up illegal behavior to sweep in huge quantities of data, including that of American citizens.
Obama claimed after the revelations that "there is no spying on Americans. We don't have a domestic spying program." It later turned out that not only did the NSA have a "secret backdoor ... enabling it to search for U.S. citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant," but a previous domestic spying effort was halted by the notoriously NSA-friendly Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011, which found that it was seriously illegal and that the NSA had deceived the court repeatedly when describing the program.
In other words, Obama lied.
After the Snowden revelations, there was a push for reform, which resulted in the extremely weak USA Freedom Act. Even that thing is barely functional today, as the judge presiding over the aforementioned FISC at this moment has blatantly refused to carry out reporting requirements under the law, as Marcy Wheeler explains.
When Trump was elected, I perhaps naively expected Democrats to see at least some of the problems with unchecked surveillance powers — especially given the histrionic rhetoric that features constantly among #Resistance liberals. If Trump is "going further down a dangerous and un-American path of word and thought control" by banning certain words from administration publications, as Nancy Pelosi asserts, then surely his quasi-police state powers should be trimmed?
Indeed, if they actually took Trump's manifest authoritarian tendencies seriously, Democrats would seize this opportunity not just to make the NSA conform with the plain instructions of the Fourth Amendment, but also to further curtail its power. The NSA director is an Obama holdover at the moment, but who knows who Trump might appoint if he ever manages to get a basic understanding of what the agency does? Paul Nehlen? Milo Yiannopoulos?
Dragnet surveillance partisans always insist that these programs simply must be renewed lest America be hit with waves of terrorism. But studies examining foiled terrorist plots find zero help from dragnet programs — which fits with a basic statistical understanding that any dragnet methodology is going to swamp investigators in false positives. Indeed, it's highly possible that a necessity to get a warrant will actually improve overall security, by forcing law enforcement to do the basic police work that is the foundation of all investigations.
But no. Not only have Democrats failed to come to grips with their mistakes during the Obama years, they're voting to renew President Trump's sweeping surveillance authority. It seems knee-jerk deference to the security state has been instilled so deeply that even the prospect of being blackmailed by the racist-in-chief can't crack their instinctive love of sweeping powers for secret spies. (That's setting aside the disturbing but can't-be-ruled-out possibility that they're already being blackmailed.)
And for that, no one is more responsible than Barack Obama. Great work all around.
Read
Typical liberal duplicity. They will try and trap or blame the president if illegal surveillance takes place. Deep state operatives will continue to spy on President Trump and any of their enemies when the next democratic regime takes the White House.
This is an outrage!
Good bye 4A.
“But no. Not only have Democrats failed to come to grips with their mistakes during the Obama year...”
Here we go again, another naive conservative who wishes to think of Dems as “mistaken”. Making a mistake means inadvertently taking action that was not intended or even taking action and obtaining an unexpected outcome. Obama deliberately and knowing did the things he did. Thy were not mistakes that need to be, by their measure, fixed.
Now they a raising the stakes because they believe in just a few brief years these powers will be theirs. And this chump cannot understand it?
The fear was that the reaction would result in destroying our National advantage, like the Church Committee did to CIA human spying capability in the 1970's. Now that our security capability is preserved, those who abused it can be publicly prosecuted, to deter such abuse in the future.
Here comes the Storm!
And the TSA.
You really think anyone will be punished?
“You really think anyone will be punished?”
I do.
High ranking FBI personnel (Gold Badges) have already been demoted/reassigned/stripped of authority.
The Dept of Justice IG document dump (1.2 million) to Congress has occurred, and likely that the report has been briefed to their oversight committee - and yet the expose by Republicans continues, in fact accelerates pretty sharply. That indicates to me that they have good grounds.
I don’t know if major political figures like Hillary will be brought to justice, but I do believe that career FBI, DOJ and Intelligence Community personnel who participated will be punished, and purged from office. Swamp draining is essential, or they will attack again.
One interesting possibility, is that Rod Rosenstein gets the boot, and someone new takes oversight of Special Counsel Mueller - sharply limiting his scope, forcing a final report, or even dismissing him because the original basis was debunked.
Blah blah blah...
One thing I read about recent events was Samantha Power was asking almost daily to unmask Americans. I’d bet a dollar to a donut that intel ended up with Hillary and/or Obama.
Your entire life is all out there. Anything you do can be traced right back to you if someone has the means and motive to do so. The 4th Amendment has been rendered pretty much meaningless by technology.
Criminals being criminals, they will adapt and begin committing crimes off the grid leaving no electronic trail. A modern investigative police force will have no skills or tools to catch them.
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