Also, the fact that the George W. Bush administration’s director of NSA and Vice President Cheney came out in support of Obama on NSA surveillance didn’t help.
“The man who served as the director of the National Security Agency under former President George W. Bush said that President Barack Obama has been more transparent about top secret surveillance programs than his predecessor.
Gen. Michael Hayden, former NSA director, praised Obama for resuming those programs.
‘We should just take a sense of satisfaction that what we were doing, once candidate Obama became President Obama, he saw that these were of great value and frankly, were being very carefully done,” Hayden told CNN. “National security looks a little different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa.’
Hayden applauded Obama for making the details of the NSA’s data collection available to members of Congress.
‘Frankly, the Obama administration was more transparent about this effort than we were in the Bush administration,’ Hayden said. ‘I mean, they made this meta data collection activity available to all the members of Congress. Not just all the members of the intelligence committees.’”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney added his voice to the debate by arguing that the surveillance programs are necessary if terrorist attacks are to be stopped. He told Fox News Sunday that Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information about the existence and extent of the surveillance, is a “traitor” who has damaged national security.
As vice president after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people in 2001, Cheney helped design the controversial system, leaked by Snowden, for keeping track of the public’s emails and phone calls.
“Former Vice President Dick Cheney added his voice to the debate by arguing that the surveillance programs are necessary if terrorist attacks are to be stopped... As vice president after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people in 2001, Cheney helped design the controversial system, leaked by Snowden, for keeping track of the public’s emails and phone calls.”
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the majority of the American people were willing to allow their constitutional rights to be abridged, in order to gain greater security from terrorists’ threats. Cheney felt he was responding quite reasonably and responsibly to what he considered to be a dire threat to our safety. Perhaps history will judge him to be correct. The NSA claims that some 50 attacks have been thwarted by its program. I wonder how much of the current opposition would evaporate if there were another major attack. For myself, I’m willing to forgo some security for greater civil liberties, because I believe the greater threat to our well being as a nation is a too powerful government.