Posted on 06/13/2013 3:04:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." That's what Secretary of State Henry Stimson said to explain why he shut down the government's cryptanalysis operations in 1929.
Edward Snowden, who leaked National Security Agency surveillance projects to Britain's Guardian, evidently feels the same way.
"I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government," he explained, "to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
Some questions about this episode remain. How did a 29-year-old high school dropout get a $122,000 job with an NSA contractor? How did his job give him access to material including, he says, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Agency Court documents?
And why did he flee to China's Special Autonomous Region of Hong Kong and make his revelations just before the Sunnylands summit, where Barack Obama was preparing to complain to Xi Jinping about China's cyberwarfare attacks?
Oh, and now that he has checked out of his Hong Kong hotel, where has he gone?
All tantalizing questions. But some other questions that many are asking have clear answers.
Is the NRA surveillance of telephone records illegal? No, it has been authorized by the FISA Court under the FISA Act provisions passed by (a Democratic) Congress in 2008.
The NSA is not entitled to listen to the contents of specific phone calls. It has to go back to the FISA Court for permission to do that.
Under the Supreme Court's 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision, the government can collect evidence of phone numbers called, just as the government can read the addresses on the outside of an envelope.
Snowden presented no evidence that the NSA is abusing its powers by accessing the private information of those with obnoxious opinions. There is, so far anyway, no evidence of the kind of political targeting committed by the Internal Revenue Service.
Instead the NSA is looking for patterns of unusual behavior that might indicate calls to and from terrorists. This data mining relies on the use of algorithms sifting through Big Data, much like the data mining of Google and the Obama campaign.
Snowden also exposed the NSA's PRISM program, which does surveil the contents of messages -- but only of those of suspected terrorists in foreign countries.
During George W. Bush's administration, many journalists and Democrats assailed this as "domestic wiretapping." But the only time people here are surveiled is when they are in contact with terrorism suspects in foreign countries.
The right of the government to invade people's privacy outside the United States is, or should not be, in question.
You might think, as Henry Stimson did in 1929, that it's ungentlemanly. But as secretary of war between 1940 and 1946, Stimson was grateful for the code-breaking programs that enabled the United States and Britain to decrypt secret Japanese and German messages.
That code-breaking, as historians recounted long after the war, undoubtedly saved the lives of tens of thousands of Allied service members.
"The Constitution and U.S. laws," as former Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "are not a treaty with the universe; they protect U.S. citizens."
It is an interesting development that Barack Obama has continued and, Snowden asserts, strengthened programs that he denounced as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate.
As George W. Bush expected, Obama's views were evidently changed by the harrowing contents of the intelligence reports he receives each morning. There are people out there determined to harm us, and not just because they can't bear Bush's Texas drawl.
The Pew Research/Washington Post poll conducted June 7 to 9 found that by a 56 to 41 percent margin Americans found it "acceptable" that the "NSA has been getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism."
That's similar to the margin in a 2006 Pew poll on NSA "secretly listening in on phone calls and reading emails without court approval."
Those numbers are in line with changes in opinion over the last two decades.
With increased computer use, technology is seen as empowering individuals rather than Big Brother. And with an increased threat of terrorist attack, government surveillance is seen as protecting individuals.
In these circumstances most Americans seem willing to accept NSA surveillance programs that, if ungentlemanly, are not illegal.
I agree, of course, but that’s not how the USDOJ sees it.
Everything Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did was legal, too.
>>Exactly, not illegal because congress passed an unconstitutional law making it legal.
Yes, and upheld by the SCOTUS and enforced by the USDOJ.
I stand corrected. I returned home from the office to check the citation. The book “Defence of the Realm The Authorized History of M15” by Christopher Andrew does not have Stimson in the index. I still recall reading a similar passage though, but obviously it wasn’t in this book in regards to this book.
Under the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, infantcide is not just legal but a right.
Just because SCOTUS makes a ruling doesn't make it right.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was not “illegal” either. That act allowed Federal Marshals to force citizens to assist them in capturing runaway slaves.
Just because government gives itself permission to do something may make it legal in the sense that all three branches of government allow it. That doesn’t necessarily make it in harmony with the Constitution. The famous case, where the Supreme Court ruled that slaves were not Constitutional Persons, was 7 years later: Dred Scott v Sanford.
And while we are on the topic, don’t forget that one of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, signed the abominations collectively called the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), an act that which made illegal the publication of “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government or its officials.
Are we sufficiently close to losing so many of our UNALIENABLE rights that the risks posed by a Constitutional Convention are worth taking? I think so.
Barone is another Ivy Leaguer, who has as his motto: “Hooray for me, screw the rest of you.”
Same opinion as other Ivy Leaguers - like Michael Medved, who is openly ridiculing anyone who challenges the NSA snooping.
People should stop looking at political parties and start looking at the US political system as “them” and “us,” where “them” are the inbred elites who have attended tawny schools and lunch in fashionable restaurants in Boston, NYC, DC etc and sneer down their noses at the common riff-raff, who would be “us.”
You raise a point about the Ivy League elitist thing. I often had to interview these fools and the moment you trap them in a lie or dumbass contradiction, they use the same argument to respond: I graduated from an Ivy League school, where did you graduate from? I tell them I graduated from Thomas More College in Merrimack NH and scored the lowest GPA among my graduating class. Sometimes I like to stump them with my humility approach.
Is Barone really so naive as to think that the NSA isn't teeming with the same Democratic partisans which permeate every other department of the federal government? Laughable...
What utter, unconstitutional garbage.
BULLSH*T!
Endeavor to persevere! LOL!
In the Smith vs. Maryland case the phone company used the pen register on person’s line at the government’s “request.” No warrant was obtained, but the phone company at least knew that is was providing the information. Did Verizon know what the NSA was doing here? The Court ruled that there was no “search” so I guess no warrant was required.
An analysis of whether Smith applies in this case would need to compare the technology available in each case and the information derived.
Funniest thing I ever saw in my life was the reverse of that when a school superintendent was confronted by my dad and my best friend’s dad over some issue at my high school. The Superintendent knew both of our fathers worked on ranches so assumed both our fathers were uneducated.
The Superintendent got hot and to prove he was smarter he told both that he graduated from ASU and my girlfriend’s dad dropped it on him that he was a Princeton graduate. Yep my friend’s father graduated Princeton, became a fighter pilot in WWII, returned to own a car dealership in Tucson and had a massive heart attack and was told to take it easy so was working on a Quarter horse ranch. My friend’s dad was a humble man so few even knew his background.
My dad finished the conversation by telling the Superintendent that he only had an 8th grade education and was still smarter than he was. Funny stuff, the best part was later the state school superintendent came down on our school hard on the side of our parents. We had a male P.E. teacher which was unheard of in those days and he was being too friendly but the school administration didn’t want to do anything about it.
Why, yes. I too trust the same gov’t that abuses our 4th Amendment to come clean when it says “Nope, we don’t do THAT.”
Or the secret courts. Nope, no abuse possible there.
And when the multiple agencies ‘accidentally’ release tax/health records...who’s going to put the genie back in the bottle?
Interestingly, most libtards are NOT perfectly OK with this.
Several times in the past week or so, I've snuck behind enemy lines into DU to eavesdrop, and just as on FR, there are a small number of jackboot lickers condemning Snowden, and the vast majority are incensed at the domestic spying, and very glad someone blew the whistle on it.
A final uncomfortable realization is that the affluent suburbs have...become Democratic...going upscale is the right move...Going upscale also means downplaying the cultural issues that were an important reason for Republican victories from 1980 to 2004. Here, young voters...oppose criminalization of abortion, but they also disfavor it -- the position of the great middle of the electorate. They tend to favor same-sex marriage -- the days of winning votes by opposing it are nearing an end...But upscale seems to me to be the way to go.
Social engineering that coerces changes in American communication methods by threatening Americans is also a violation of the First Amendment. Publications and broadcasting of hysteria by elitist hags and SNAGs are also incompetent methods with respect to public affairs, and we don’t need the conniving culture from the more clownish, temperate areas of Europe in our leadership. This is the USA.
It’s ungentlemanly? The AMKGB police state is not polite? I want some of what this wackobird is drinking! Or...does the AmKGB have something on him?
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