An N.S.A. Christmas
The New Yorker and Ryan Lizza have an excellent investigative piece about the recent history of N.S.A. and metadata and Internet collection. Barack Obama and Joe Biden both opposed the overreaching surveillance programs before they expanded them as President and Vice President.Obama already switched sides in 2006, after a provision had been added to the law that allowed phone companies to challenge a government request for their records. N.S.A. lawyers had argued (in secret) before the FISA court that Section 215 of the Patriot Act allowed them to legally collect the phone records of Americans. (They were retroactively legalizing recent N.S.A. activity.) Both Senator Obama and Senator Biden voted to renew the Patriot Act with expanded authority. The new law allowed the N.S.A. to put a “pen register” on every phone. Anytime a citizen of the United States has made a phone call since, it has been logged in an N.S.A. database.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s doggedness in investigating N.S.A. has helped make up for what was a terrible initial vote in favor of the Patriot Act. During the presidential election cycle of 2008, he engaged in some wishful thinking, as most Democrats did, when Obama promised a comprehensive review, upon election, of N.S.A. surveillance programs. In office, Obama would discover that the N.S.A. was exceeding even the allowances set forth by the classified and rubber-stamping FISA court, and lying to the court about its actions besides. Only two thousand of the eighteen thousand phone numbers the agency was searching had court approval, and now we know, thanks to the leaks of heroic whistleblowers, that many of those numbers were not linked to international terrorism investigations either, but directly to American citizens and domestic political critics of Washington and the corporate state-- to their phone, Internet, and public library records. What legal limits existed were brushed aside. Obama would not put an end to Bush’s extrajudicial surveillance program when given the chance, instead he codified it. As it has been with two wars, drone strikes, torture policy, and a U.S. concentration camp for Muslims in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, President Obama’s record on surveillance has not been one of reform, but of ordaining crimes of the state.
Here is wicked smart Will Hunting in 1997, offering his take on the N.S.A.
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posted by CM @ 7:23 PM
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