Congress, Constitutional Law, Courts, Media, Politics, Society

Learning To Love The Matrix: Feinstein Defends Warrantless Surveillance of All Citizens

225px-dianne_feinstein_official_senate_photoAs expected, in facing yet another attack on civil liberties by the Obama Administration, Democratic members are choosing personality over principle. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., CA) has come out to assure the public that it is a good thing that the Administration is spying on them and encourage them to accept such surveillance as the new normal. In the meantime, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R, Ga), insists that the surveillance must be fine because “to my knowledge we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information.” Of course, it has been secret and just last February the Administration succeeded in blocking an effort of dozens of citizens and groups challenging such surveillance programs before the Supreme Court.

Feinstein is notorious among civil libertarians as someone who knew of many of the abuses during the Bush Administration, including possible knowledge of the torture program and warrantless surveillance programs. However, the Administration is clearly putting the push on to get members in front of cameras to claim that that surveillance stopped a plot. It is an effort to get citizens to give up this core liberty. Of course, if you strip every civil liberty, you can claim additional plots. These members are responsible, again, for a failure to use oversight authority to protect civil liberties. They have clearly been given the message to try to change the story in the critical first 24-hours in classic Bush (now Obama) terms: yes we put everyone under surveillance but it paid off.  It is working.  Where the headlines began the day as “huge surveillance program,” media is now reporting the story as “surveillance program foiled terror plot.”  Once again the media is being played like a fiddle by our homegrown Neros.

Feinstein has continued her dubious record of leading the charge against liberty — a curious role for the Democratic senator from a state like California.

My favorite however is Chambliss who seems clueless that the Obama Administration has classified information needed to challenge these laws and no citizens had information to complain about . . . because Chambliss and his colleagues kept it from their constituents.

Then there is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) fresh from his questioning whether bloggers have first amendment rights. Graham stated “I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States.” Most citizens would shudder at the thought of using either Feinstein or Graham as the barometer for civil liberties.

However, the spin is on. This is the ultimate test for Obama in seeing whether he can get citizens to give up not only the protection for the free press but their own privacy rights. This program is a critical step in the establishment of massive databanks on citizens. However, our members of Congress are lining up to embrace such a potential authoritarian tool.

Source: ‘Huff Post

110 thoughts on “Learning To Love The Matrix: Feinstein Defends Warrantless Surveillance of All Citizens”

  1. The feds are snooping on everyone but it’s all good because it’s for our protection. It is too bad that we can’t confirm any of that since we aren’t allow to know anything due to “National Security”.

    Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, whos is watching the watchers…

  2. Po,

    Yes. Well said. In support of your point, consider that:

    “… folly is a child of power. We all know, from unending repetitions of Lord Acton’s dictum, that power corrupts. We are less aware that it breeds folly; that power to command frequently causes failure to think; that the responsibility of power often fades as its exercise augments.

    [Deluded rulers have often] staked the life of the nation and lives of the people on a gamble that, in the long run, as many of them were aware, was almost sure to be lost. The impulse came from the compelling lure of dominion, from pretensions of grandeur, from greed.” — Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly

    The US government — and especially President Obama — has become drunk on “the power to command” and simply enraged that any among the citizens of the nation should even think to question their assertions of absolute authority over us. They have long since forgotten, if they ever believed, that they work for us and not the other way around. All that they say and their every action has nothing to do with anything but power. No amount of money can buy the thrill of stomping on the lives and hopes of millions. Venality plays a part in human affairs, yes, but it cannot hold a candle to vindictive viciousness and sheer sadism as a motivator of official human conduct. Look what happened to the short-lived Occupy Movement: about as pathetic a “threat” to power as any I have seen in my lifetime. As George Orwell — again the master diagnostician — put it:

    The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? — 1984

    We have to face up to this. “In an age of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” But, of course, the corporate counter-revolutionaries now in power know all this and have prepared the strategies and tactics necessary to smash any challenge to their rule. After all, they will simply say in their defense:

    “Don’t you know we’re at ‘war’?”

    And what can any “patriotic,” “red-blooded,” “freedom loving,” “troop supporting,” “mom and apple pie cherishing” American say in response to that? Game over — as long as the Permanent War Paradigm allows the rulers to rule without reason.

  3. Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 20m

    Way past time that the Surveillance State sees the sun. Sun is really good for you. Enjoy it. Absorb the rays.
    Expand
    Glenn Greenwald Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 23m

    The dam has broke – let the water and sunshine flow
    Expand
    Glenn Greenwald Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 23m

    OUR STORY: NSA has direct access to tech giants’ systems for user data, secret files reveal … http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

  4. More to love–from G. Greenwald at the Guardian: “The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

    The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows them to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.”

  5. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html?hpid=z1

    U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

    By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Thursday, June 6, 5:43 PM

    With Laura Poitras, board member of The Freedom of the Press Foundation co-reporting:

    Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

    And what is the govt doing with PRISM?

    The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

    The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

    An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

  6. rafflaw,

    The transcript is available in the comments section of Glenn’s current post:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

    =====

    NSA-Verizon Surveillance: Welcome to the United States of Total Information Awareness

    Posted on 06/06/2013 by Juan Cole

    http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/surveillance-information-awareness.html

    I believe I may have been targeted for inappropriate surveillance on political grounds, myself.

    I just hope I live long enough to see the USA PATRIOT Act, the most un-American and anti-patriotic piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Act, repealed or struck down. Until then, I don’t really accept that I am living in the United States of America. We are living, folks, in the United States of Total Information Awareness. -Juan Cole

  7. I found those remarks about hanging a woman offensive, too. The war on women is escalating again but it is taking a back seat right now.. Thanks, for calling out the new poster 😉 out, raff.

  8. The comment by gbk above is spot on. I did not know that stuff about Feinstein or however ya spull name. I just cant stand her on tv with that West Coast sanctimony and she is not good at itchinBay when its necessary. So, you have a complainer who is not a good one and a thief of public money on top of that. Ugly thing too.

  9. “They hate us for our Feedoms…”
    … And so Congress supports and defends legislating away those Freedoms

  11. We have to consider the source of these comments. It is maddening that some people actually believe what these criminals are saying. I wonder what would happen if a corporation took a stand against the governments demands? Would the contempt hearing be made public? Would the Judge finally put some corporate folks in jail?
    AP.
    Thanks for the Greenwald link.

  14. Gbk if that is true, she should be tried for corruption and hung til dead if convicted. I am totally serious

  16. Bron – Riffing on Jam-Master Billy Shakespeare. Those are electronic bugs, so quit scratchin’! 😀

  17. These “representatives of the people” are avaricious, morally bankrupt lowlife sociopaths. Why do Americans keep voting for their current reps. in Congress? It’s stupid. Never vote for the same politico twice – NEVER. Think of what a shake up it would be!

  18. “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous
    thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless
    it may be.” 1984

  19. Mike, that something is called power. Not only does it corrupt absolutely, it also tends to make reality appear as a choice, rather than …well, reality. The same principles (or lack thereof) that drive Ahmadijanan in Iran, Morsi in Egypt, Recep Erdogan in Turkey…are the ones that drive Obama and his cronies.
    The person who seeks higher office believes in his higher “powers”, leadership rights afforded by birth. legacy, capacity, means, or divinity. Once in power, those rights translate into duties to the people even against their will because one knows better than they do. Those duties to the people quickly are moved behind the duties to the office, and the office being oneself, one can no longer separate what one thinks is right from what the office thinks is right ,what is in one’s interest from what is in the office’s interest.
    This is fully “normal”, as it is wholly human. This dynamic is present in every group; it is just a bigger expression of it in this political realm.
    Generally, strong institutions are the only real means of countering these overreaches, but since our institutions are emasculating themselves severely, the second best option has to come to the forefront: activist populace. Every single one of us has to be a reporter, a whistleblower and an activist, otherwise this is just the beginning of what many great thinkers have foreseen ages ago, that we will go the way of Rome.

  20. Feinstein is about as corrupt as they come.

    She resigned as chair of the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee (MILCON) in late 2005 under conflict of interest charges — conflicts that directed huge contracts to two of her husband’s (Richard C. Blum) companies, URS and Perini.

    URS in 2000 held $108,726 in military construction contracts. After Feinstein started chairing MILCON in 2001 URS received $142 million in construction contracts, with more forthcoming. Perini held $7 million in military contracts in 2000 (after almost declaring bankruptcy in 1997) and by 2005 held $2.5 billion in military contracts.

    You can read about this in a Project Censored article here:

    http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/23-feinsteins-conflict-of-interest-in-iraq/

    Now, another of her husband’s companies, CBRE Group, stands to make millions for listing USPS properties in the rush to privatize the postal service.

    http://www.activistpost.com/2013/06/keeping-it-in-family-senator-feinsteins.html

    Feinstein has chaired the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence since 2009, and has sat on this committee since 1993. She knows where most of the bones are buried, and is obviously unperturbed with the direction of this country.

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