Sen. Bernie Sanders asked the National Security Agency (NSA) a question that one would have thought would be easy to answer: has the NSA spied on Congress with its massive surveillance programs? The answer that came back was chilling in what it did not say. The NSA would only assure Sanders that it has “the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.” That must be a bit unnerving for Congress since it has allowed the NSA to strip citizens of the most basic privacy protections.
Sanders did not leave much room for wiggling by defining “spying” as “gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or e-mails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business.”
The agency responded to Sanders with the assurance of “NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.”
Attorney General Eric Holder also deflected answering the same question at a congressional hearing last summer.
We could ask again how we came to this moment. There was a time when the failure to answer this question in the negative would have led to furious hearings and bipartisan investigations. However, once again, liberals and Democrats are largely silent — choosing personality over principle. It is yet another example of how Obama has divided the civil liberties movement in the United States.
In the meantime, the highly controversial secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (that is widely viewed as a rubber stamp for the intelligence community) renewed its approval of the National Security Agency’s telephone-records program on Friday — giving the government a new three-month window to collect data on all Americans’ phone calls. That is the 36th time the program has been approved by the FISA, which allows for no opposing counsel or public access to the court. Under the FISA law, the standard guarantees surveillance orders with virtually no articulated suspicion in comparison to the standards under the Fourth Amendment.
Source: CNN
‘Hackers’ arise! Time to treat the N. S. A. a little of their own medicine!!!
I have rapped on this blog about what I have tagged: The 1933 Parallels. Briefly, in 1933 someone burned the German Parliament building which was called the Reichstag. President von Hindenburg blamed Communists and issued the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended all civil rights protections and the Holocaust and WWII followed. On 9/11 a similar call to go get the terrorists rang out. The Patriot Act was passed. We have NSA crimes. We have some idiot Third Reich “court” called the FISA Court.
What is down the road folks?
This has been happening for many years, sad to say. But it came under light when Bush/Cheney took it to another level and Obama put it on overdrive.
The only difference between then and now is the descendants . during hitlers time it was the great grand patriachs in charge. their goals have never changed. some died and others took their places. something none seem to understand is all of this was planned way back then. and each generation is groomed to continue the protocols of zion any descendants who are defiant are put away permanently and the next moves into the in charge throne… 13 so called ruling families and lo and behold somehow those 13 families never seem to lose anything!! no matter what happens to the rest of humanity. billions lost, stolen, just gone and yet there are 13 families who own everything and lose nothing……
is it any wonder they feel they are born to RULE the world they no longer even live on…. smfh
Can someone dig out my reply to Jill?
Jill
White Rose Society.
The students mobilized…
… Then were declared terrorists to the state by a secret court and summarily executed.
http://www.whiterosesociety.org/WRS_pamphlets_home.html
If you have all the pieces to the puzzle and just can’t put them together…
… Blaming the puzzle maker only makes you look incompetent.
THE AL QAEDA SWITCHBOARD
BY LAWRENCE WRIGHT JANUARY 13, 2014
http://m.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2014/01/13/140113taco_talk_wright
Edward Snowden has started a critical debate about the legality and the effectiveness of the N.S.A.’s practice of collecting unlimited records of telephone calls made to, from, and within the United States. Last month, two federal judges came to opposing conclusions about these issues. On December 16th, Judge Richard J. Leon, in Washington, D.C., ruled that the indiscriminate hoarding violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and its prohibition of unreasonable searches. Two weeks later, in New York, Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that the metadata-collection program was lawful and effective.
nick spinelli
Kraaken, In the 70′s a lot of history teachers started teaching to hate America, so they were ahead of the curve.
=======================
And the manifesto they taught, which neoCons still are hung up on, is the Powell Manifesto from the one democrat who Nixon appointed to the Supreme Court (The Military NSA Spy Program Is Part of the Powell Manifesto).
The NSA acts under the responsibility of the president. But not enough people in Congress have the fortitude to call the president out. Now they suffer as ordinary citizens. Now given the NSA has admitted to digging up dirt on what the label as enemies, how much dirt is the NSA and president going to dig up and slip to their cohorts in the hews media on individual members of Congress the president decides are his political enemies. Sure it won’t be as blatent as them disappearing but when we live in a society where a sex scandal is enough to topple a political leader completely, once they are gone it doesn’t matter how.
As others have mentioned about this Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama/Clinton dynasty of political control of everyone, despite Hillary Clinton being an intelligent and capable leader the idea of continuing a dynasty in itself is not worth the benefit of electing her.
Nate, Hitler did not deceive everyone. There was resistance to him. Many people understood what was going on. Some people did try to stop Hitler and some people did what they could, when they could.
We are honor bound to do no less in our own nation.
bill McWilliams, I would have the same thoughts. But, not w/ this group; it’s social, not glad handing.
There is one more thing I’d like to say.
Hitler deceived his own German people too. Hitler deceived everybody, and in spite of the atrocities the German people committed, they too were victims.
I suppose the only thing we can do is search for the truth.
Mr. Beaton,
It’s out of our control now. It’s out of control now. What will be will be, and what will be we’ll see.
@Nate
Yes.
It reminds me of the last line in the old movie Nuremberg Trials, where the function of judges complicit in Nazi Germany was explored.
The German judge attempting to explain and justify his complicity said “… you have to believe me, I didn’t know it would come to this…”. To which the salient reply was (something like) “…The first time you made an unjust judgement it had come to this…”.
And so here, Nate has articulated one of the deep central truths about our history; about who we are as a people; and the dissonance of what we believe about ourselves vs what is actually true.
Go back to those days when somehow the line that seemed to be the one thing we, as America, would not do, what presumably set us apart is that we did not torture people, even our enemies. “They” did, not us. And that fig leave/mind twist rational under pinned all sorts of inflicted mayhem. Including dropping Atomic bombs… and in our day- as Nate points out- abandoning the global structures of human decency that we helped create after WW2… all in our stupid pell-mell quest to win a war that was not only not winnable, but not even a war.
How quickly and easily we, in the form of our so called leaders, the Cheney-Bush cabal, jettisoned these norms, reveals the depth of the rot.
I also recall that many “We the people” tried to stop this torture policy; fought and argued against it, did what they could – which wasn’t much after all – The complicit forces were immense…
So the closing thought that “WE” are also complicit is an interesting one to work out.
At one level I get it and believe it to be true.
But at another I wonder what “WE” could have done?
I think this question is one that deserves some attention…
One way to approach it is to consider the context of the original article: how or what can we actually do re the NSA spying issue that isnt being done? How do we even have the conversation that we are having now without the heroics of Snowden?
And where was the commiserate hero exposing and resisting the underbelly of our new found justifications for torture?
The point and the issue go the heart of our identity. I wish there were a way to have that conversation somewhere where it made a difference.
Remember all those 202 area code “accidents”?
It is extremely scary that NSA and Holder refuse to answer yes or no. They are completely above the law, something which should be anathema to all our citizens.
Sanders and others from Congress need to pull their crap together and say we will jail people until we get a yes or no answer. Of course they will not do this because they have abdicated their role of being a check on the executive. They don’t care about their oath to the Constitution. In this, their behavior is exactly like that of Obama, who also cares nothing about his oath of office or our Constitution.
Yes, we did get this way through, in part, citizens who went to (and still do) the mat for Obama. Any person who questioned the greatness, wisdom and innate goodness of Obama was banished from Democratic and “liberal” discourse. Citizens who engaged in this banishment, their very own two minutes of hate, deprived all of us of the truth. They have made opposing governmental wrongdoing quite difficult. It is possibly past the ability to oppose by this time.
As I had written many times on this blog, this banishment, this silencing of those who saw the truth and would speak out, was warned of in some of our greatest literature–to no avail. Powerful people need their minions and silencers to succeed in their plans. This silencing is shameful and it has done real harm to our society.
The threat of terrorism is no reason to abandon one’s Constitution. If this govt. was serious about lessoning the risk of a terrorist attack, it would do something useful–that is, it would stop bombing the crap out of Muslims. It would stop arming everyone on earth to the teeth. That’s far more effective in stopping terrorism than spying on everyone, everywhere. I think it is quite clear from the govt.’s own actions that they don’t give a crap about terrorist attacks.
“I know folks[mostly attorneys] who have a breakfast w/ him once a month. No politics talk allowed.”
He knows what’s possible,the attorneys only know what would make them richer. The Senator knows that too. So, let’s talk football.
One of my favorite pols of all time, and my home state Senator, was the ONLY Dem to vote against The Patriot Act. I agreed w/ maybe half of Feingold’s votes, maybe less. But he was honest, and never bought by a special interest. I know folks[mostly attorneys] who have a breakfast w/ him once a month. No politics talk allowed.
Oh well, we get the government we deserve. 16 years of Bush and Obama and now we are close to a fascist dictatorship. I always did think the Patriot Act was a bad idea. And to top it off we could have Bush/Obama for another 8 years with a Clinton Administration. Time to move to Belize?
I think congress needs to pull the funding on the NSA and clean house.
Chances are that not only Congress, but members of FISA, SCOTUS, POTUS, FLOTUS, CIA, Military, i.e. everyone’s electronic communications are being archived and can be searched. There is probably no way to separate communications involving those folks from all other messages so long as those folks communicate with the rest of humanity.
And by the way, that is a good thing. If anyone should be monitored, it is decision makers.
Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.
~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (author of Frankenstein)
The monster, carried to the extreme, has turned on its creator.