THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE U.S. CONGRESS IN STOPPING NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE: WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD

[Lodestar]

THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE U.S. CONGRESS
IN STOPPING NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE:
WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD

BY GLENN GREENWALD

(excerpt)

....So the pro-NSA Republican Senators were actually arguing that if the NSA were no longer allowed
to bulk-collect the communication records of Americans inside the U.S., then ISIS would kill you
and your kids. But because they were speaking in an empty chamber and only to their warped and
insulated D.C. circles and sycophantic aides, there was nobody there to cackle contemptuously or
tell them how self-evidently moronic it all was. So they kept their Serious Faces on like they were
doing The Nation’s Serious Business, even though what was coming out of their mouths sounded
like the demented ramblings of a paranoid End is Nigh cult.

The boredom of this spectacle was simply due to the fact that this has been seen so many times
before – in fact, every time in the post-9/11 era that the U.S. Congress pretends publicly to debate
some kind of foreign policy or civil liberties bill. Just enough members stand up to scream “9/11?
and “terrorism” over and over until the bill vesting new powers is passed or the bill protecting civil
liberties is defeated.

Eight years ago, when this tawdry ritual was still a bit surprising to me, I live-blogged the 2006
debate over passage of the Military Commissions Act, which, with bipartisan support, literally
abolished habeas corpus rights established by the Magna Carta by sanctioning detention without
charges or trial (my favorite episode there was when GOP Sen. Arlen Specter warned that “what the
bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some nine hundred years,” and he thereafter voted in favor
of its enactment). In my state of naive disbelief, as one Senator after the next thundered about the
“message we are sending” to “the terrorists,” I wrote: “The quality of the ‘debate’ on the Senate
floor is so shockingly (though appropriately) low and devoid of substance that it is hard to watch.”
So watching last night’s Senate debate was like watching a repeat of some hideously shallow TV
show. The only new aspect was that the aging Al Qaeda villain has been rather ruthlessly replaced
by the show’s producers with the younger, sleeker ISIS model. Showing no gratitude at all for the
years of value it provided these Senators, they ignored the veteran terror group almost completely
in favor of its new replacement. And they proceeded to save a domestic surveillance program clearly
unpopular among those they pretend to represent.

...//...

All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one
should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. Government is . . . the U.S. Government.
Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s
particularly true of empires.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-mass-surveillance/

[Thinkingabout]

1. Perhaps public opinion of Snowden reporting is not as important to as many as some would like to

believe. It was a smoking gun, when the smoke cleared and more information was revealed it was not actual phone conversations being recorded brought realization it was only a smoking gun. No, phone conversations between one and grandmother was not recorded.

[Lodestar]

2. I see you are an admirer of Ann Richards...perhaps a Texan?

If so, have you ever been to SXSW? I think the whole Snowden revelation is actually quite relevant and important
to people. If you rely on the msm alone to determine what's important to people then perhaps that needs to be balanced by what's actually happening 'on the ground' so to speak. And I think SXSW, where Snowden appeared this year by teleconference from Russia, would be a good place to start,:

...Despite the objections of some U.S. leaders, the long lines Saturday for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's videoconference on similar topics indicate Snowden's appearance will draw monster crowds. Conference organizers will have a handful of spillover rooms set up for viewing the talk from outside the main venue, and the nonprofit news organization The Texas Tribune will be livestreaming the Q & A session for anyone with an Internet connection.

The SXSW festival has long offered a sprawling range of topics. But this year it's taken a harder-edged programming turn to online privacy and surveillance implications. The conversations come at a moment when social media have driven Americans to willingly share more data about ourselves than ever before, and the digitally savvy are more skilled than ever in using that data for various purposes.

"Privacy's a big focus at the 2014 event, as well it should be," said SXSW Interactive Director Hugh Forrest. "It's something I think impacts all of us given how much social is now just a part of our lives. It's essentially woven into everything we do."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/03/10/288372317/sxsw-snowden-speech-has-conference-buzzing-congressman-stewing


Here is a video of that event:

[Thinkingabout]

4. Perhaps to you it is, it is not to lots of others.

[Lodestar]

5. And you know this.....how? n/t

[Thinkingabout]

6. I am one of the others.

[Lodestar]

7. And who are the other 'others' ?

I deduced from your first reply that it wasn't important to you. Why is that?

[Thinkingabout]

12. Others, why yes, of course.

Too many lies, was already known, was told in 2006, committed crimes to gather, has changes the reason why he did this many, doubt if he knows why.

[merrily]

3. ....

[Blue_Tires]

8. Of course it was Glenn's BFF Rand Paul who voted against it...

And Greenwald has been in full shameless spin mode since yesterday...

All of our nouveau privacy advocates screwed the pooch yesterday, and they know it

[Lodestar]

10. Spin or truth? Many progressives are not such party loyalists that they can't hear truth

when it is spoken or demonstrated, regardless of its messenger. It's the message rather than the messenger that carries weight. The world is complex, shades of grey, and loyalists often only see black and white, us vs. them, at the expense of an overriding and more nondualistic and deeply rooted truth. If you can't sort out the truth from party lines then you go deaf dumb and blind to truth with a capital "T", our own inner compass and can be manipulated. Ask the Germans....

This is what Greenwald said about another demonstration of R. Paul's stands in 2013 for government about the deterioration in civil rights that has been in full swing during the Bush administration and that has neither been challenged or defended by Obama's administration:

Progressives may disapprove of the GOP messenger, but on Wednesday they found much to support in his long-winded challenge to Obama's claimed authority to target US citizens for extrajudicial killing.

During a filibuster led by Tea Party champion and Republican US Sen. Rand Paul journalist Jeremy Scahill sent out a tweet that summed up the position of many progressives who might abhor Paul's political philosophy broadly but couldn't help but champion his stand against a declaration by the Department of Justice earlier this week stating that President Obama could, in theory, target US citizens for extrajudicial killing, even while on US soil.

As Paul spoke during his filibuster that lasted nearly 13 hours, running from late Wednesday morning into early Thursday, Scahill tweeted:

You can be totally disgusted with many aspects of Rand Paul's views & still think he is doing the right thing here. Why is that so crazy?


As the Huffington Post's Luke Johnson explained:

Paul, an outspoken libertarian, pointed to what he called the abuses of executive power and civil liberties under Obama's administration. In particular, he objected to the contents of a letter he received from Attorney General Eric Holder that asserted the U.S. government had the legal authority to kill a U.S. citizen on American soil.

"Where is the Barack Obama of 2007?" he asked, referring to then-presidential candidate Obama's criticism of Bush-era violations of civil liberties. "If there were an ounce of courage in this body, I would be joined by many other senators," he added. "Are we going to give up our rights to politicians?"

Though progressives are deeply at odds with libertarian views on domestic policies, the role of government, the economy, reproductive rights, and many other issues—there has been wide agreement on issues surrounding what's been called "the imperial presidency," in which the executive branch claims sweeping powers. In addition, there is also shared opposition—if not a shared critique—of US military adventures overseas.

What has become most obvious during the Obama presidency, however, is though Democrats (at least on occasion) would raise alarm bells and protest against President George W. Bush's imperial overreach or contentious violations of civil liberties, now that a Democratic president has claimed powers even more radical—such as extrajudicial killings—Democrats have mostly gone silent in their opposition.


http://www.commondreams.org/news/2013/03/07/progressives-pauls-filibuster-against-extrajudicial-killing-target

[Blue_Tires]

11. Greenwald's puny ass-covering arguments dismantled here:

The Senate yesterday buried—at least for now—surveillance reform, when Republican senators refused to allow the current draft of the measure to proceed to a vote. Glenn Greenwald has an interesting reaction to the legislative death of the grandiosely-named USA Freedom Act: It doesn’t matter. He writes, “it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally.” Change, rather, is going to come from elsewhere: from the posture of the technology companies, from individual use of encryption, from policy decisions of countries other than the United States, and from court proceedings:

I find this argument a little perplexing coming from the man who considered the NSA’s bulk metadata program to be so important and so alarming that it was the very first program he broke in all of the documents Edward Snowden gave him.

Metadata can’t really be encrypted; it’s the information used to deliver content and thus has to be readable, after all. And the law as currently interpreted permits NSA to collect it in bulk. If one thinks this activity is offensive and important, one should not be too dismissive of legislative action to curtail it. Yet Greenwald suddenly does not sound quite so alarmed by the possibility that NSA would retain the authority to bulk collect metadata:

There is a real question about whether the defeat of this bill is good, bad, or irrelevant. To begin with, it sought to change only one small sliver of NSA mass surveillance (domestic bulk collection of phone records under section 215 of the Patriot Act) while leaving completely unchanged the primary means of NSA mass surveillance, which takes place under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, based on the lovely and quintessentially American theory that all that matters are the privacy rights of Americans (and not the 95% of the planet called “non-Americans”).

Huh. There’s a lot in this short passage to unpack, but focus for now just on Greenwald’s contemplation of the possibility that killing the USA Freedom Act might be a “good” thing and his dismissal of the metadata program as merely a “small sliver” of NSA mass surveillance. He even goes so far as to dismiss the end of bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 as no more than “mildly positive.” I don’t recall his reaction to the underlying program, at the time he revealed it, as only that bulk telephony metadata collection was mildly negative. I recall a slightly more breathless, outraged response. So what then are we to make of his now-casual dismissal of a bill to curtail the program—much less the entire reform mechanism, which is to say legislation, that would enable that curtailing? How can bulk metadata collection be an intolerable outrage and ending the 215 program be merely “mildly positive” or even a net negative?

One possibility is that Greenwald doesn’t know how to take yes for an answer. He is outraged by bulk metadata collection. Congress contemplates ending bulk metadata collection. So it suddenly fades in his mind in importance relative to outrages Congress is not addressing.


http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/11/the-senate-kills-surveillance-reform-and-glenn-greenwald-shrugs/

[alarimer]

13. I am personally disappointed by this vote.

I'm also dismayed by liberals' apparent acceptance of this spying when it's a Democrat that's doing.

You know full well that if these revelations came to light while Bush was President, you all would be screaming outrage, you hypocrites.

[blkmusclmachine]

14. ,

,

[bemildred]

15. "The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform."

At last, another guy who gets it.