Who said this re: PATRIOT Act and FISA?:

[geek tragedy]

Note: please don't cheat and use google/Bing/etc.

Nobody is advocating that the surveillance and investigative tools authorized by the Patriot Act and FISA be abolished. The argument is that the only way to prevent the long history of serious abuse is to impose more stringent requirements of proof before the government can subject someone to those invasive powers.

6 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Dianne Feinstein
	1 (17%)
	Eric Snowden
	0 (0%)
	President Barack Obama
	1 (17%)
	Glenn Greenwald
	0 (0%)
	Rand Paul
	0 (0%)
	Candidate Barack Obama
	4 (67%)
	Harry Reid
	0 (0%)
	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
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[geek tragedy]

1. Prediction: some people will be surprised at the answer. nt

[LWolf]

2. Context. nt

[geek tragedy]

3. It's a perfectly reasonable statement.

One interesting aspect of it is that the rhetorical style is of one person but it comes from someone with quite a different viewpoint.

Also, the statement that "nobody is advocating that the surveillance and investigative tools authorized by the Patriot Act and FISA be abolished" seems to be . . . not accurate?

[LWolf]

4. I know who said it.

I'm just pointing out that how the statement is interpreted depends on the context, which isn't available in your poll. I think the "nobody" refers to those in Congress, and since the speaker is talking about efforts to reform, rather than abolish, it's probably accurate in that context.

[geek tragedy]

5. Greenwald himself is taking the position of reform, not abolition.

All of that, in turn, is justified by the core Bush/Cheney fallacy: if we have Power X and then prevent a Terrorist attack, it proves Power X is justified. Over and over, that was the formula used by Bush followers to justify everything they did (we tortured/illegally eavesdropped/rendered/detained without trial and used it to stop Terrorist attacks; that proves those powers are necessary). This is exactly the argument anonymous Obama officials are making here: we used Patriot Act and FISA powers to disrupt the Zazi plot, so that proves we need those powers in undiluted form to Stay Safe.

But the central fallacy of the Bush/Cheney claim was always obvious: the fact that certain information was obtained using illegal warrantless eavesdropping doesn’t prove it wouldn’t have been obtained using legal eavesdropping with a FISA warrant. The same is true for information obtained through torture or trial-free detentions. It was just pure fear-mongering of the most illogical form: if we had Power A and Good Event B then occurred, that proves Power A caused Event B. It’s like someone who uses a hammer to kill a fly and — after smashing his whole house up — finally gets the fly and then proudly announces: ”see, this proves that hammers are needed to kill flies; without hammers, flies will get away.”

That’s exactly how Obama officials are exploiting the Zazi case to justify full-scale Patriot Act renewal and FISA preservation. Nobody is advocating that the surveillance and investigative tools authorized by the Patriot Act and FISA be abolished. The argument is that the only way to prevent the long history of serious abuse is to impose more stringent requirements of proof before the government can subject someone to those invasive powers. The Zazi case is an argument against such reforms only if there’s some plausible claim that the reforms would have impeded disruption of the Terrorist plot. Without such a claim, citing the Zazi case in opposition to reforms is just unadulterated fear-mongering.

As Marcy Wheeler documents, there is no plausible argument that the Patriot Act and FISA reforms sought by civil libertarians would have impeded the Zazi investigation at all, since the Government had evidence from that start that Zazi was tied to Al-Qaeda and involved in an active terrorist plot, and it used that evidence to obtain court approval. If anything, the well-executed, apparently law-abiding Zazi investigation proves that these surveillance reforms are perfectly consistent with — not impediments to – effective Terrorism investigations. Yet here we have the Obama administration anonymously reciting the standard Cheneyite justification for these powers (we stopped a scary Terrorist attack and that proves we need them), and the Post just recites it all uncritically.

The Wheeler post accepts that Section 215 of the Patriot Act was used to help stop Zazi, as apparently does Greenwald.

Has Greenwald ever called for the patriot act to be repealed in full?

[LWolf]

6. I don't know.

I don't read him that often.

In this case he is advocating for the "civil libertarians" who were seeking reforms.

[geek tragedy]

7. Note what he does:

Past fallacy: Cheney said we got info with torture, which does not mean we wouldn't have gotten it without torture.

Present fallacy: Obama said we got info through Patriot Act, which does not mean he wouldn't have gotten it with a reformed Patriot Act.

He could have argued against the idea that they would have gotten this information without the Patriot Act period, as he did with the idea of information gotten through torture, but didn't.

To put it another way, he didn't argue that there needed to be additional controls around torture.