Posted on 06/14/2013 4:19:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
After a week of enduring the crossfire over the relative benefits and dangers of the deeds of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, I am left wondering whether this has been good or bad for our nation.
The answer depends on the lens we use for viewing America and the world.
I belong to two groups that are not large enough. The first is the portion of America that is very, very serious about fighting terror. I have not forgotten 9/11 or the fact that its hatchers would love to do it again.
Stopping them has been an all-consuming pursuit for our intelligence gatherers and analysts, and their success rate has been positively stunning.
I also belong to the segment of America that has had it up to the eyeballs with the Obama administration, from the bad policies to the dishonesty to the weak foreign policy to the targeting of political enemies. 2016 cannot get here fast enough for me.
Added up, my result is a general willingness to allow wide latitude in surveillance, tempered by concerns over its possible abuse.
I had the very same position as the Patriot Act was being hammered out while smoke still rose from Ground Zero. The deciding factor in my decision to support it was the faith I placed in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to use that information to catch terrorists without spying on my phone calls and e-mails.
In the wake of the IRS disaster, the Benghazi deceptions and the basketful of other scandals-in-waiting, it is very hard to similarly trust this administration as it holds that intelligence apparatus in its hands.
But I will. For now.
I am able to do so because unlike the IRS, which was easily corruptible with its ranks of employees eager to please a boss who demonized Tea Party groups at every turn, our intelligence services operate in another landscape. They are not so easily tainted.
Unlike Snowden, who decided to recoil at tactics that have kept us safe, the average NSA analyst is proud to be part of the effort that has prevented further 9/11s. They are not a lock-step gung-ho robot army, but few are the ones who awaken to suddenly shudder at procedures laid out and practiced for a dozen years.
But Snowden did, and rather than step with courage into an American courtroom to make his case and dare our system to punish him for his perceived heroism, he hunkers in Hong Kong, happy to let its people and its justice system handle his fate.
He is missing out on a certain love-fest he would receive here from Americans more worried about potential Orwellian nightmares than the real threat of Jihad.
There is no doubt that a government that can dig into our phone calls and e-mails can surely ruin our lives if it has a mind to. But the police department that arms its officers can also wantonly kill us. The military that fights our wars could also order us into concentration camps.
Here’s an idea: How about if we wait for abuse to occur before we lament it?
The IRS story is a blatant example of government overreach brought to bear to the detriment of a president’s political enemies. It happened. All we have to do is get to the bottom of how.
The NSA panic is all based on what people with all of those security clearances could do, might do, if their motives turned dark.
Show me a litany of people whose lives have been needlessly assaulted by NSA snoopers, and I’ll jump onto the indignation wagon with Snowden, Rand Paul and his Dad, and anybody else up there weaving stories of “turnkey tyranny.”
Until then, the only thing I want to say to Ed Snowden’s besmirched colleagues is: thank you.
Thank you for the painstaking work you do every day on the off chance that a call that looks innocent today looks very different when a number shows up on the phone of the terrorist we catch tomorrow.
The voices raised in alarm over this practice either don’t know or don’t care that dots cannot be connected unless you have all the dots.
This is not to say that their concern is without merit. Privacy is a basic demand of citizens overseen by a powerful government, and it is useful to debate how to balance it against security interests.
But that debate should not be started by an activist narcissist who has soured on his NSA job.
Know who could have started the debate? Our Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. On that fateful day in March when Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden asked if government were collecting “any type of data” on millions of Americans, the answer should have been: “Senator, as you know, I can in no way comment on the degree or specifics of the methods we use to gather information in our effort to stop terror attacks.”
At that point, Wyden, or Snowden, or anyone in between could have tried to raise a chorus of dissatisfaction with the fact that secret things need to remain secret.
So as I restrain myself from faulting surveillance tactics under Obama that I favored under Bush, I join the call for similar consistency from the left. Any liberal defending these practices today owes Bush an apology. Joe Biden can start.
Meanwhile, we should all retain our vigilant alertness to misuse of power.
My mistrust of this White House runs deep. But I retain my belief in the countless men and women of the NSA, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Their pursuits are within both reason and the law.
If anyone were to subvert their tasks -- if anyone in authority were to try to use anti-terror investigative tactics to unduly spy on the innocent, we would then have genuine violations of law, and they would be called out by a genuine whistleblower, which Edward Snowden decidedly is not.
I’ll take the word of the author of the patriot act over your apologist arse any day
The man is doing CYA and reeled you in hook, line and sinker.
Don’t count on it.
You are a jackass.
LINE
SINKER
Jackass you be.
Just spent a good part of an hour tracking down several threads where one of your friends ~ certainly not one of mine ~ called down the mods on me when all that had gone on was I posted a response followed by '(/s)' ~ which is totally wierd.
Otherwise your stuff is pretty much the same as mine except you sometimes read the 4th and ignore 'unreasonable' ~ an easy error ~ kind of like that guy Bush appointed to the Supreme Court telling us the 'takings' clause in the 5th didn't apply where the gub'mnt was taking property from a poor man to hand over to a rich man.
So there can be differences of opinion on this stuff, but there are too many instances where someone calls in the mods.
So, should you check threads to see if i've already posted and just not comment, or the other way around?
In short, what do these people want? ~ BTW, no cussing. If I don't get to do it, neither should others unless they can prove a medical need.
Assange seems to be taking credit for paying his way.
My money is on NIxon (take that as a metaphor) ~ which is probably why NOBODY at the top is taking up Snowden's flag ~ they know people who were burned standing up for Alger Hiss!
May not have made that clear earlier ~ but no sense in not bringing this thread up to date. Amazing what a difference a week or so makes in this kind of 'chase that SUV' event.
In case you missed it, Congresscritter Jerry Nadler was all for Snoweden, then was against him. He's one of those lefties with a 100% ADA rating. Which means............ he dunno? proly
Second, the sources are immaterial to the fact that the NSA is collecting massive amounts of data on Americans, after lying that they were not. Third, it is clear they do not have anything resembling due process as to how that data is used. Fourth, Obama is lying through his teeth about how transparent the process is. And fifth, you are still defending the NSA getting this data, so you are as big a skunk as the rest of them.
What part of the meat of the fourth do you not understand?
...and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The government is waaaay out of bounds here.
The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone. What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. The "enemy" they're seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It's the American people.
The Terrorists already knew, and have long known, that the US government is doing everything possible to surveil their telephonic and internet communications. The Chinese have long known, and have repeatedly said, that the US is hacking into both their governmental and civilian systems (just as the Chinese are doing to the US). The Russians have long known that the US and UK try to intercept the conversations of their leaders just as the Russians do to the US and the UK.
They haven't learned anything from these disclosures that they didn't already well know. The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
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You have YET to condemn the NSA gathering all this data on Americans. You have instead parroted the Beltway establishment's attacks on the person who revealed that unconstitutional, illegal and unethical gathering. Which means you are part of the problem, not part of salvaging the 4th Amendment.
You must have forgotten that 'STARVE THE BEAST' has as much to do with refusing to demand big corporation/big gub'mnt intrusiveness as it does FIXING the tax system so the money just isn't there for them to waste.
I like to go all the way back to initial causes, and it does me no good to cut off NSA if I leave the Chicoms in place to acquire exactly the same information from all the Telco in the country, surreptitiously or otherwise.
So, why don't you demand we fix the tax system and utility operations? Do you want the Chicoms to continue to be able to access that information? Or don't you want to eliminate the source?,P>I don't think you are conservative enough.
That's when a warrant is required!
That applies even if you are not at home locked up in your castle keep. You can be out walking down the road with a backpack and the cops simply can't stop you and look into that pack without a reason. That is an unreasonable search.
In my lifetime we've seen days when you were walking down the street and cops could stop you and do more than frisk you ~ and the courts did nothing.
The courts ~ THE FEDERAL COURTS ~ BIG GUB'MNT COURTS ~ changed that ~ I think roughly when I was entering highschool.
All of the cases involving just hanging around (Loitering) involved the decision of REASONABLE vs. UNREASONABLE ~ Warrent issues followed in due course.
Sorry I can't change my own life's history so that I can forget when the cops didn't have to get a warrent to search your backpack.
Now if you want to discuss this on strictly theoretical grounds and ignore the period from roughly 1860 to 1960, fine ~ but that's not where we are coming from.
You still refuse to blame the fedgov for gathering this information in violation of the 4th Amendment - to the contrary, you present a bastardized interpretation of such. You are a pimp for the usurpers. I don’t debate with anyone so debased. Later.
If you don't cut off the creation of the data and its implicit information, you are just going to tempt all the bad guys and they'll get it anyway.
It could be you are not getting the point ~ that if we have a set of laws that require phone companies, et al, to establish data files, and subsequently data bases, that have this information in them, then the gub'mnt is, in fact, the cause of the problem. Eliminate the data file requirements ~ prohibit data of that type from even being generated ~ and you don't need to worry about NSA or anyone else.
There are other ways to generate billings!
Dirtboy, when I tell you what it is, I am not debating you.
You don't just like the jackboot, you hump it.
And you fail to realize that as long as the data is scattered across hundreds of different corporate databases it is not dangerous to liberty. It is when it gets amalgamated and accessible, with low standards for acessibility, that it becomes dangerous. And you have blamed everyone but the parties driving that amalgamation.
Sorry, pal. They do not have probable cause. You do understand that the courts cannot alter the constitution? Right? The founders rebelled against this kind of tyranny. FR is here to defend the constitution and fight against this crap. Reminder: Defending big government fascism will endanger your posting privileges.
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