> Now part of the reason they’re not abused is because they’re — these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC
Greenwald has been writing about the total ineffectiveness of judicial checks on state power for over a decade, primarily since Bush vastly increased executive branch reach and began using the state secrets privilege as a protective shield, crippling the ability for courts to properly prevent abuses.
See "Elimination of judicial check on executive power" on Wikipedia, citing an article from 7 years ago (2006):
When Congress wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, I suppose they could have found some way to keep its details a secret, so that Soviet agents wouldn't know what the FBI and NSA's authorities were. But Congress made that law public, because it's a fundamental principle of democracy that laws should be public all the time, and every American should be able to find out what their government thinks the law means.
The FISA court is arguably the most bizarre court in the United States. This is the only court I know of that is structured to hear essentially one side – it comes from the government. A group of judges operating in complete secret and issuing binding rulings based solely on the government's arguments have made possible the sweeping surveillance authorities the public only found out about [recently.] What's noteworthy is there has been nobody there to argue the other side, and that is what we want to change. This court has to be reformed to include an adversarial process where arguments for greater privacy protections can be offered alongside the government's arguments for greater surveillance powers. It should have a selection process that produces a more diverse group of judges, and a process to ensure that its important rulings are made public so that American people can understand exactly what government agencies think the laws allow them to do. It was a lack of protections like these that allowed secret law to persist for so many years.
I think you got the outcome ranking flipped. If Obama knew and lied: politicians tell lies and have done so for ever.
If he didn't know, then the most powerful spy agency in the world was disobeying an elected official. Given the control they could exercise over officials via say black mail (just think what Anthony Wiener would have done to avoid those pic's coming out earlier or Petraeus to avoid his affair being known), this is really scary.
He was lying. Watched the press conference. The insane degree of hesitation and very-careful-word-picking he did are not the hallmarks of a man speaking sooth.
Yeah, it really gets interesting if you compare his recent press conferences on the matter against what his speeches sounded like in 2007; here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix4sy25wF-E
Reading this, I actually felt my brain snap a little and I laughed hysterically until I couldn't breathe for about five minutes straight.
I think anyone just skipping over this bit here really needs to stop and consider more closely the magnitude of this completely true astute observation.
Don't know if you saw your sibling's response, but it's not how he's always talked (slightly different to what you said, I know). I forget what it was he was responding to, but you could see him blundering headlong into nearly discussing a classified programme OTR, and changed the tack of his sentence after a good eight seconds of pause. I'll see if I can find the moment, but I just sat there astounded at the blatancy of it.
You know, I would have to imagine that if Obama were in full possession of all the facts, he would have known that Snowden had those slides and kept his mouth shut. Obama's just too smart to make a blunder like this.
Talking about things you don't know to be true is still a lie in my book. The correct way of dealing with this would have been for him to say - we don't know but we have launched a full scale investigation. He failed to do so, while still protecting the NSA in the face of all accusations and proof to the contrary. Does it really matter if he knew or not?
We'll never know how much Obama is involved in all of this, but another possibility would be that the masses simply don't care much about facts and believe the words spoken by what seems to be a competent authority in the matter, especially one they voted for. Ask regular people what they think about this whole deal, you'll have a revelation.
Obamas actions in the near future will reveal all. If he was lied to and deceived, he will apologize publicly and he will reign down vengeance on those who lied to him (unless he is completely spineless and incompetent, which I don't believe he is).
On the other hand, if he knew all along these revelations will simply be played down and it will be business as usual in Washington, DC (although the NSA will probably not make the "mistake" of tapping Washington DC calls instead of Egypt again).
All I'm saying is that Obama is provably not in command of all the facts needed to prevent a blunder like this. Whether that means he had no idea about the scope of abuse or whether he was simply unaware that anyone would prove his lies wrong is yet to be determined.
Obama's just too smart to make a blunder like this.
When I've watched him being questioned sharply in news conferences he takes it personally. He doesn't like to be challenged by reporters. He has a large enough ego where he could very easily think he has the upper hand and wouldn't be caught.
Am I misunderstanding something here - surely the information Snowden revealed is that the NSA is dumping EVERY electronic communication in a huge data dump all the time. Then they are saying "sometimes" they search for the wrong things in that archive?
Isn't the issue that they are archiving everything we do in the first place?
Yes, but this specific article is simply a matter of hanging someone with the rope they were given: Obama claimed abuses wasn't happening; NSA's own records shows they are.
While on one hand it's a bit of a side show to argue about this, it's also far more likely that people in general will see the problem if they see officials repeatedly being wrong or outright lying about abuses than to get them to accept there's an issue with "just" collecting the data.
The "just" collecting the data part of the problem is rarely seen as an issue with those who largely trust the government, as it is hard to get them to understand that even if the current government is ok, things can go rapidly downhill as they tend to write off any examples as too extreme or "can't happen here".
The best way of reigning this in, is unfortunately to focus on any too close for comfort abuses. E.g. if one found NSA staff stalking ex'es would likely get a far more furious response than NSA staff collecting data about large swathes of the population.
Come on, if this wasn't a bold-faced lie, it follows that the President is either incompetent/derelict, or not in control of the NSA; in which case the President is a dupe/stooge, and the NSA is acting of its own accord outside the defined bounds of its authority. Let's hope the President is merely lying.
Or the US Government is just like any other large organization, and when low level employees screw up, or a report looks bad, everyone at every level on the way up tries like hell to bury, burn or spin it, so that it doesn't reflect poorly on them.
Which does imply a troubling level of ignorance and/or misplaced trust, but is not necessarily on par with the NSA gone rogue or the President being a dupe or stooge.
Okay then, the NSA is incompetent/untrustworthy, and the gov't is incompetent/derelict in its oversight duty. I'm going to consider this possibility to be less likely, unless the President makes decisive corrective action. If the President can't denounce/correct such a failure, then he owns it.
> interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review
Oh please give me a break. This is the worse they could come up with, a typographical error that produced large swaths of unusable data for analysts? Seems like a normal part of any computer systems: a typo will cause unintended consequences.
Sensationalist reporting and blatant exploitation of minor plot twist shouldn't make it to any serious news outlet, let alone HN. Let's keep it serious guys.
The issue wasn't the fact that an innocent mistake happened; the issue is that a major breech of privacy for some large number of US citizens wasn't reported to the groups tasked with judicial and congressional oversight of the NSA.
The reason it occurred is meaningless. The _fact_ that it occurred should have been reported.
Think you are making an assumption saying that it's unusable. I'd say it was highly usable.
202 is the North American telephone area code for Washington, D.C.
Do you think you could get usable data with a 'large number' of calls placed from DC? I can't think of anywhere better really.
Obama may not be wrong at all if these are unintentional violations. However, Obama may well be wrong if they were intentional actions in accordance with NSA standard of operating procedure (SOP). So, the NSA isn't actually abusing its powers, just as Obama stated. Just an awful NSA employee who is not following the SOP.
I think that's an important distinction and perhaps the point Obama was making.
Agreed; the headline has been intentionally worded to be more inflammatory than is warranted. What use is a free press, I wonder, when all they print is propaganda, and when the populace swallows it hook, line and sinker?
It might well explain the flip-flop. All of those privacy bills and NSA constraint bills he pushed, voted for and in some cases put forward, appear to be a complete reversal to his position now. Why?
It seems super suspicious the "202" to "20" mistake occurred for more than a single call, and it just so happens your political enemies are in the area code mistaken?
Wrong. This isn't abuse. The audit found only unintentional spying--in other words, mistakes. No organization is perfect; bugs do exist, especially in software. It's pretty amazing to see the detail at which these incidents were logged, however.
> The audit found only unintentional spying--in other words, mistakes.
An internal audit by an agency that routinely fails to report "mistakes" to the people responsible for their oversight, and who routinely instructs staff to alter information before it is handed over, and which has previously been found to instruct staff in how to "shore up" justifications for their searches, "only" finds unintentional violations of the law.
Oh, come now. The definition of the verb is "use (something) to bad effect or for a bad purpose; misuse". That implies willfulness. Accidents and bugs are not abuse; were they, we wouldn't have separate words for them.
Or, put another way: I hear you inadvertently spilled water on your wife at the dinner table last night; tell me, for how long have you been abusing her?
That's a bad analogy. Spilling water on your wife and domestic violence are very different things. Both the inadvertent (and arguably unconstitutional) collection of Americans' data by the NSA and the willful abuse of power by the NSA are pretty horrendous acts, whichever you choose to believe happened.
You talk about the verb when we're talking about the noun. I call cherry-picking. And yet the point still stands. You can accidentally misuse something. How many people have accidentally misused C pointers?
Greenwald has been writing about the total ineffectiveness of judicial checks on state power for over a decade, primarily since Bush vastly increased executive branch reach and began using the state secrets privilege as a protective shield, crippling the ability for courts to properly prevent abuses.
See "Elimination of judicial check on executive power" on Wikipedia, citing an article from 7 years ago (2006):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#Elimin...
It seems people are just beginning to pay attention to what Greenwald has been warning us about for a long time.