Europeans are upset after learning that, in addition to capturing the email and phone records of Americans, the NSA has been doing the same to them in a global assault on privacy. This includes leaders of allied nations. The United States is now viewed as an international rogue nation with no respect for the law or privacy or even loyalty. Now into this explosive environment has jumped Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Rogers responded directly to the French and said that this is all a “good thing” and the French should really be “applauding and popping champagne corks” for keeping them all under surveillance and destroying any notion of privacy.
Senator Marco Rubio (R., FL.) offered his own reaction to the story with a dismissive comment that “everybody spies on everybody.” Privacy it appears is worth little more than a shrug today. That is now the range of concern for the death of privacy among our leaders from a dismissive shrug to an open celebration.
Rogers truly personifies the new mentality of the surveillance state created under President Obama. While George Bush sought to expand surveillance, it was Obama who succeeded in getting Democrats and other politicians to embrace the new security state and a transparent society model. What is most striking is how members, particularly those supposed to be exercising oversight of these agencies, have become virtual spokespersons for the security state.
Rogers is a former FBI agent and is married to a former government contractor with the United States Department of State for intelligence-based and physical security services.
When asked how we should to respond to the French who are a bit peeved about having millions of calls intercepted, Rogers did not even suggest a hint of concern for privacy (which is so last century in the minds of politicians):
“I would argue by the way, if the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks. It’s a good thing. it keeps the French safe. It keeps the U.S. safe. It keeps our European allies safe. This whole notion that we’re going to go after each other on what is really legitimate protection of nation-state interest, I think is disingenuous.”
Presumably, the “really legitimate protection of nation-state interest” supporting American surveillance of the world is the same “really legitimate protection of nation-state interest” that supports our claim to be able to use drone attacks without the permission of countries, even allied countries, if we consider the target to be legitimate. It is unclear who is telling Rogers that objections to capturing communications of allied leaders and nations are clearly “disingenuous.” That “disingenuous” concern for Rogers concerns the monitoring of 70 million French telephone calls and Rogers simply cannot understand why the French are not thanking us. That is why those Spaniards intercepted among the 60 million calls by the NSA should be equally overjoyed. Indeed, he has attacked the media (as have Democratic leaders over prior surveillance stories) for upsetting people. He has denounced the stories as “dangerous” — not dangerous like a surveillance state, mind you, but dangerous because the government is your friend.
If Rogers appears in denial if not openly delusional, it is part of the new reality that has been created by the Obama Administration that borders on Orwellian doublespeak. Privacy is now a threat; the media is now a danger; and government monitoring is now reassuring . . . and of course the French should go back to the old grateful, Champaign-drinking, American-led silent partners that we used to love.
So, to France, Michael Rogers wishes to say, “De rien!”
Source: Politico
Rep. Rogers stepped in it again just the other day with this:
“”you can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated, right?”” (around 2:18 in the clip)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131029/18020225059/mike-rogers-you-cant-have-your-privacy-violated-if-you-dont-know-about-it.shtml
Egad.
AY to Mike Rogers…. You’re a jerk wad when I met you 20 some years ago…. When you had issues with your Federal Employment….. Then became a State Senator…. You’re still a jerk wad…. And not much else has changed….
aaahhhh so it’s all right for the NSA to spy on everyone but not ok for Snowdon or others to spy on the NSA. If ‘everyone’ is doing it, why are they so peeved at Snowdon and Wiki-leaks?
http://youtu.be/WAQlsS9diBs
all countries spy on each other. why is this news? How long has this been going on? At least for recorded history.
randyjet 1, October 28, 2013 at 9:58 am
The Congress can fire the general by the way.
…
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No they can’t by the way.
That is the province of the Commander in Chief, of the Executive Branch.
Congress is the Legislative Branch.
In order to stop the unconstitutional spying will require the repeal of the Patriot Act and Congress will need to pass legislation to control and rein in the NSA.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/usa-spying-cameron-idUSL5N0II2WQ20131028
Britain’s Cameron says may act against newspapers over spy leaks
LONDON | Mon Oct 28, 2013 12:33pm EDT
Oct 28 (Reuters) – British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday his government was likely to act to stop newspapers publishing what he called damaging leaks from former U.S. intelligence operative Edward Snowden unless they began to behave more responsibly.
“If they (newspapers) don’t demonstrate some social responsibility it will be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act,” Cameron told parliament, saying Britain’s Guardian newspaper had “gone on” to print damaging material after initially agreeing to destroy other sensitive data.
(Reporting By Andrew Osborn; Editing by Ralph Boulton)
“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it.”
“How about: Require warrants. Repeal the Patriot act. Repeal the authorization of military forces. Jail those found to breach privacy without a warrant. Undo any whiff of this poisonous unitary executive B.S. Seat grand juries to probe matters of war crimes.” (James Knauer)
Short, sweet, to the point and should be repeated like a mantra
“If Rogers appears in denial if not openly delusional, it is part of the new reality that has been created by the Obama Administration that borders on Orwellian doublespeak.”
JT is absolutely correct, but the sell out by Democrats, that has allowed this Administration to do that, goes back to the beginnings of the “Cold War” and the fear of being labelled a “communist”. From Truman’s time on the majority of Democrats have been equally supportive of a Surveillance State. When Sen. Frank Church broke ranks to investigate the CIA in the late 70’s, his days as a Senator were soon ended.
An interesting memo written for the Queen’s service mentioned the real threats concerning any revelations of mass spying. Here are the threats: “• GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone “well beyond” what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies’ mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.
• GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissible in court.
• GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with “press handling”, including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and America’s National Security Agency.”
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/25/leaked-memos-gchq-mass-surveillance-secret-snowden
Updated in 2012 there remains no mention of terrorism in this memo. Those needing protection were not the public, they were the secret “services” and the corporations who are aiding and abetting breaking the law.
Law breaking looks bad and could even get the govt./corporations in trouble. It’s why the 5-eyes need state sponsored propaganda–lackeys to make mass spying look like its for the public good, when nothing is further from the truth. No 5-eye nation has a shortage of lackeys, that’s for sure!
This is their own words, words written in a memo that was not supposed to be made public. It shows their true aims. These aims don’t even mention terrorism. There is nothing which should encourage the French or anyone else to pop bubbly and inflate balloons! The clandestine “services” are knowingly breaking the law in a bid for power over entire populations.
What anonymously posted said too.
And, yep: “What James Knauer said.”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/23/false_fronts_natsecwonk_nsa_scandal_expose_washington?page=0,1#
False Fronts
How the biggest intelligence community scandal in modern memory and Washington’s infamous Twitter troll expose the real D.C.
BY DAVID ROTHKOPF | OCTOBER 23, 2013
Excerpt:
” Yes, many governments spy. But so too do all countries have armies, police forces, and tax codes. In each instance, the question is not whether to pursue the activity — it is how to do it, how to limit it, and what values should underpin it. Our spying has overreached. We took risks we shouldn’t have for rewards that were too limited. Even when there were perceived threats that seemed to warrant these activities (and that cannot be the case in some of the recent examples we have encountered of spying against friends and companies), many of those threats may themselves not have been so great to warrant the risks associated with spying. What if the NSA scandals result in a more fragmented global Internet? What if they are used as an excuse by repressive regimes to violate their own citizens’ privacy? What if they are used as an excuse to deny U.S. companies access to their markets? What if they are used as an excuse to justify similar actions against the United States?
Those aren’t arbitrary questions. All those things not only might happen — they will. They are the direct result of America’s intelligence overreach, of mistakes in judgment by senior White House and intelligence community decision-makers … and of the enabling atmosphere provided by the pliant, arch, unquestioning attitudes of the faux-hard-boiled wonks who to this day are helping to impede the kind of real reassessment of priorities, methods, and means the U.S. intelligence community so urgently needs. “