Honestly, the idea that the NSA is going to go after senators and congressmen for doing their jobs with broad popular support is just a pure and obvious bluff. This would just increase the intensity of the controversy and spotlight, which is clearly the last thing the NSA and the Obama administration want right now.
These folks need to suck it up and go out on just a bit of a limb for the sake of our democracy. That is the oath they took and they bear much of the responsibility for allowing things to reach this point in the first place. If a 29 year old can risk his life and give up any chance of seeing home again to do the right thing, these supposed representatives of our interests can take a much, much smaller risk and do the same.
And what are we to do when their bluffs are revealed to be truthful, and the NSA's sway over all levels of government to be absolute? What if we were to learn that the Constitution is simply a feeble veneer meant to conceal the fact that there is certain legislation we're powerless to exert pressure over?
What happens when the sea of democracy recedes and all that's left are naked, stinking husks that were once called "congressional oversight" and "judicial oversight"?
My comment may the height of hyperbole and scaremongering, but it's difficult to ignore the opportunity to express myself in such a colorful manner.
I'm curious how Californians feel about Dianne Feinstein (Chair of the intelligence committee.) I'm not in CA; do people there plan to vote her back in when she's up for reelection or has the NSA scandal hurt her?
People in California, as everywhere, don't feel anything in particular about their representative.
The power of incumbency does not come from citizens believing their rep does a great job, it comes from money putting that rep in the public eye. People in general will vote for who is put in front of their face the most. "I've heard of this guy, never heard of that other guy so much, so this guy it is. Now home to the TV."
Idea: Perhaps election voting should be separated into different dates for different groups. I've certainly been guilty of knowing more about the president I was voting for than for congress persons (and even worse, state and local elections and bills). I've voted for people based on nothing more than the information on the ballot sheet. (Thankfully, I know better than to do that now.)
If people couldn't vote for lower offices simply because they showed up for presidential votes, but rather had to show up to vote on another date for other elections, then only people who actually cared about lower offices would vote for those. I think that might make it a lot harder to keep incumbents in power.
Actually I take that sort of thing as a sign of machine politics. When elections don't coincide with the ones that bring a lot of people into the booths, then the machine that's most effective at getting voters to the booths wins, unless the election becomes non-normal (e.g. a lot of people have a reason to get rid of someone, see below for two local examples).
Local elections, whenever they're held, are a real problem; unless I have real knowledge about a candidate I don't vote. My parents and I all pool our information together (e.g. my father knows which county commissioner is an idiot, and I, oh, research judges) and even then there are a lot of offices we don't vote on. And some run unopposed, e.g. our county clerk is very competent.
But that doesn't mean this is all a generally useless exercise, if an abusive public administrator, or a sheriff who doesn't play well with others is up for reelection, at least where I live they will be sent back home to spend more time with their families, or eventually to Federal prison in the case of the administrator.
This, I believe, is actually always the case. While swing voters decide a few elections, most elections are decided by how motivated each party's voters are to actually get to the polls.
A great quantitative example of this is in the (somewhat dry) "Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" by Michael Holt. While it talks about a very different time, the demonstration that the party that got the most of its voters to vote always won was pretty convincing.
At the Federal level, California Senators have to be the absolutely worst case, post-12th Amendment. Largest state by population, 3rd in area after Alaska and Texas, most expensive statewide media market, etc. etc.
A primary challenge is unlikely, since the person's career within the Democratic party would come to a swift end. Schwarznegger could possibly have beaten her, but a) he had a sleazy sex scandal and b) CA Republicans seem to dislike him even more than democrats because he has the temerity to take things like global warming seriously.
>A primary challenge is unlikely, since the person's career within the Democratic party would come to a swift end.
Not if they win.
And I don't see why you need a party insider in any event. What you need is someone who can fund their own primary campaign, or who can get enough donations from real people to do it, i.e. someone who is famous or rich or both.
>Schwarznegger could possibly have beaten her, but a) he had a sleazy sex scandal and b) CA Republicans seem to dislike him even more than democrats because he has the temerity to take things like global warming seriously.
Schwarzenneger could possibly have beaten her because he's rich and famous, but he's not the only one with those characteristics.
"What happens when the sea of democracy recedes...."
We become very glad that, outside of the fortunately rare hellholes of NYC and D.C., and to a lessor extent Massachusetts and New Jersey, we've retained the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Puts a ceiling on the tyranny the state can exercise, and any attempt to confiscate the people's arms is a clear signal to turn our cold civil war into a hot one.
ADDED: various formulations list the following "boxes", soap box, ballot box, jury box, and bullet box. We still retain the other 3 even if the ballot box becomes an effective nullity, and in our Federal system it won't likely be so at the state level. Much can be done in our system there, including calling a constitutional convention and ratifying new amendments to the Constitution. Which is essentially what happened the last time we had a impossible central government.
> we've retained the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Puts a ceiling on the tyranny the state can exercise
I'm confused by this outdated meme. A hypothetical modern totalitarian regime with the resources of the US isn't likely to be too intimidated by the large blustering egos of amateur militias and their (largely) civilian firearms.
Without the appropriate organization and infrastructure, simply having _guns_ isn't going to do anyone a whole lot of good. The government can still, at will, exercise control over the media and most channels of communication (including the internet, obviously). It can fairly easily win the war of public opinion if it really needs to. Any pockets of armed insurrection, at that point, merely constitute a series of aggravating nuisances.
Guns are just a tool, and one that will only become relatively less relevant and menacing in the modern age.
You can't imagine how the people in such a "hypothetical modern totalitarian regime" would be intimidated by their being assassinated at all levels but the very top which can afford really good protection, but would have to stay mostly bunkered down anyway?
That's just one example of how widespread gun ownership can be a bit more than an "aggravating nuisance". Another is this classic from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The GULAG Archipelago:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!
As if guns are the only things that can provide this kind of protection or have this kind of influence.
Yes, guns are powerful. So are four people with long knives. So are traps. So are the "half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, ...". The statement seems to be saying more about people's will to resist, not the necessity of firearms.
I suppose one might make the argument that guns increase people's willingness to resist, but this might not simply be because they make it easer ... in this case, the most ironically hilarious role that guns play is to provide a concrete freedom that guns, themselves, might be used to protect. That is, the best reason to have guns as a protected right might not be because they are a means by which to resist tyranny, but a right that's so painful to lose to so many that it motivates resistance.
"the US isn't likely to be too intimidated by the large blustering egos of amateur militias and their (largely) civilian firearms"
Why on earth has the US issued a global terror alert? Is there some global terror network that can really hit 21 diplomatic facilities or is the threat more local focused than that?
The US is a scared, self-defensive beast. It fears anyone with a lathe.
Good luck with that. There are basically two scenarios here to consider in a popular violent revolution:
1) The army sides with the people. In this case, the right to keep and bear arms is basically irrelevant as you have the backing of the world's most powerful army.
2) The army sides with the government. In this case, even the militia types with huge munitions caches don't stand a chance against the world's most powerful army. This is not 1776, it wouldn't be musket vs. musket.
3) The civilian force holds out long enough that a significant portion of the army becomes sympathetic towards the civilians and gradually switches sides.
Our armed forces are made of individuals. It would not be a boolean operation by any means.
False dichotomy, it's not likely that every single regiment of every single branch of the armed forces and police are all going to choose a single side.
Don't be so sure about that, the Federal government (or more specifically, the DHS) has been currying favor with local and state LEO orgs through funding and equipment distribution programs.
The relatively recent militarization of various police forces is evidence of that, and, much like the USG exerted pressure over west European allied countries to ground Bolivia's presidential plane, they will exert similar control over state and local police forces through "greater cooperation" policies.
Certainly a worry, but one bottom line is who do the local police answer to? Who pays them, who can fire them and make them outlaws with all the latter entails?
One thing that's quite unusual about our system is that policing power is smeared across the local, state and Federal levels, with the vast majority of it at the first. This imposes massive constraints on a would be Federal level tyranny.
That's certainly one way to look at it. On the other hand, the same powerful army has struggled on several occasions recently to put down insurgencies from determined, armed local populations in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, and several other places. Of course, in a Civil War II situation, there might not be the same constraint to wrap up the operation before popular support dwindles.
Occupying a hostile United States could possibly be the quagmire to end all quagmires.
Then again, in all those cases you cite they had a secure rear area, one reason I cite the "Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics" maxim. That's a much, much sticker proposition; as you posit, "the quagmire to end all quagmires", we're an ornery people.
The other issue is the "rights to bear arms" has never been a factor in any civil rights dispute in the US, whether it was systematically oppressing black people for generations or one-off riots or strike-breaking in which cops fired on crowds without causing wider conflicts as a consequence.
(arguably the one area in which citizen-owned firearms have actively affected the history of US civil liberty is in carrying out the occasional assassination of people adjudged to have been bit too keen on civil liberties)
Yep. There's a great article by the Atlantic called The Secret History of Guns. [1] I'll go over a couple of interesting points.
- Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his house was bombed in 1956. After that he had armed supporters stand guard outside his house. King's house was described as "an arsenal."
- The co-founder of the Black Panthers found a law on the books allowing them to open carry in California. Blacks were getting no protection by the police so this was pretty pivotal. The Panthers started arming themselves and had a picnic outside the State's Capital building. After this happened the racist California legislature pushed through a law banning open carry. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Funny enough, he was the first president endorsed by the NRA.
- "After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities."
- "In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control"
A bit of unmentioned history: the NRA wasn't in the business, so to speak, of endorsing candidates until after the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt (at the annual meeting), so Reagan or Carter were the first Presidents they could possibly endorse. Carter was anti-gun but smart enough not to be visibly, Reagan signed the Gun Owners Protection Act of 1986 reigning in the BATF, without which we very possibly wouldn't have a gun culture today (or perhaps we'd have tested out this thesis of armed resistance and revolt).
ADDED: Every major party Presidential candidate after 1977 has been a gun grabber with the possible exception of Romney (details on request), the NRA's only been able to endorse the least worst, or in 1992 and 1996 endorse neither.
The bit about the "1920s and '30s" is more fair, but if you read the full text and know about all that the NRA didn't support, including the cited inclusion of handguns in the NFA of '34, "forefront" falls short of the mark. And of course per the Cincinnati Revolt that NRA isn't the modern NRA, which nowadays has done a 180 on concealed carry, the gravamen of this article's claim. Major NRA figure Marion Hammer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Hammer) was the leader in establishing Florida's 1987 shall issue law, which opened the floodgates so that today 42 states, soon to be 43 with Illinois, have shall issue regimes.
Circling back to MLK, today he wouldn't have much difficulty getting a concealed carry permit (or set of them) good in most of the nation, including all of the South.
Lots of liberals were famously armed when they went into the South, like Eleanor Roosevelt, many blacks kept themselves alive or less repressed with personal firearms, like Condoleezza Rice's father and his friends, and then there's the Deacons for Defense and Justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice . jivatmanx in the other reply right now covers a bit of what happened prior to and during the Civil War; I hail from the southern edge of what you might call Bleeding Missouri and have studied it a bit, guns were most certainly a very important factor.
As for strike-breaking and all that, while it's not an area I've studied, it's well established that both sides were armed and used their guns.
I'm not saying many liberals, strikers and black people weren't armed and prepared to fight where it favoured them.
I'm saying they were, and people got oppressed in a far more direct, blatant and universal manner than anything that is likely to emerge from PRISM or the present US government's policy goals. Citizen-owned firearms might have been handy in the odd skirmish, but they didn't cause legislators or law enforcement to back down. Black people sat in the back of the bus and grudgingly accepted there wasn't much they could do about their neighbour getting lynched. Strikes were bust in a blaze of gunfire and millions of other members of the trade union movement went to work as normal the next day. Even as determined a revolutionary as John Brown failed where the Union military succeeded a year later.
Concern that the oppressed could potentially gain access to firearms neither dissuaded administrations from enacting oppressive laws nor accelerated the pace of their removal.
However, I have yet to see anyone seriously suggest that the Civil Rights Act was introduced because the police were terrified that black people defying segregation laws might shoot them, or the Supreme Court ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional because it had proved unenforceable. For that matter, those Southern whites who thought their rights were being violated by "forced busing" proved equally reluctant to resort to armed confrontation. It wasn't a hot war, or even a cold war, it was a culture war.
The right to bear arms was orthogonal to the civil rights movement: it didn't prevent the original introduction of the tyranny off "Jim Crow" laws which were effectively enforced for decades, didn't influence the legislative and judicial rulings against them in the mid 20th century and couldn't even protect the movement's key figures.
Obviously we disagree, I think the RKBA allowed a lot of blacks to continue pushing by allowing them to continue living, or living longer, or limiting the degree to which they could be easily intimidated.
One thing you're not factoring in when you compare this period to the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras is economics and technology. Everyone including blacks were much more able to afford small arms and ammo by the civil rights era, and guns were a lot more maintainable after we switched to non-corrosive primers and smokeless powder. And of course technological advances helped the economics by driving down the intrinsic costs of guns and ammo.
I think the danger that members of Congress would be concerned with at the moment is being sanctioned by Congress itself. If you lose your collegial relationship with Congress then it's probably difficult to get your bills and amendments heard, and campaign funds from the general party coffers and specific itelligence lobbyists probably dry up too. They're worried about incumbency.
Blatant, open direct manipulation and punishment by the NSA is probably not here yet. Probably soon.
This seems to get more frustrating by the day. Greenwald depicts a system where the NSA/FISA are in cahoots, seemingly deciding for themselves what they should or shouldn't be doing.
Their stated regulatory agencies, the House/Senate, aren't even allowed to read info about what is they're doing -- yet the House/Senate have to vote on NSA authorizations? This is what Congress is receiving:
"Thanks for your inquiry. The full Committee attends
Business Meetings. At our July 18, 2013 Business
Meeting, there were seven Democrat Members and nine
Republican Members in attendance. The transcript is
classified."
How does this go on for so long!?
The Congressman received no response to any of his
requests. With a House vote looming on whether to
defund the NSA's bulk collection program - it was
scheduled for July 25 - he felt he needed the
information more urgently than ever. He recounted his
thinking to me: "How can I responsibly vote on a
program I know very little about?"
Yet they vote to fund it anyway, knowing that they don't know anything about the programs they're funding.
I'll say it again: we don't know if the security services blackmail politicians, and other influential or powerful people.
When I say black mail, simply knowing that one is routinely snooped on makes people more compliant. The implication can be enough. Had a few joints at college? Want to be a politician? Well, behave and be nice to security issues then, just in case... Very much the Soviet trick. Have every one assume they are spied on.
Not a US problem as such, one for the any relationship between security and politicians (and other powerful people), regardless of country or political system. And all because security insists on secrecy, which I am not convinced is required in a vast majority of cases.
To my mind, the lack of any real reaction to the NSA revelations, both in the US and here in the UK, increase my suspicion that this implied blackmail is rife, perhaps standard practice.
We know exactly how they are being blackmailed: if they don't cooperate, they will be outed as unpatriotic and anti-American via the media, and their political careers will be destroyed as their peers duck for cover.
The threat is so clear and obvious it never needs to be expressed.
That's what the American doctrine of "patriotism" is all about, and it will remain that way until Americans start recognizing this is not just a word describing the normal love for ones own country most people around the world share, but an extremist ideology aimed at silencing dissent and enforcing conformity.
> we don't know if the security services blackmail politicians, and other influential or powerful people.
It doesn't need to be so one-sided, some Senate and House members may in fact be benefiting greatly from the NSA's spying (eg: manipulating the stock market by using their exclusive access to private information), and in exchange the NSA continues their work with impunity and without oversight. It's a symbiotic relationship where they're benefiting from each-other.
On the other hand, why wouldn't they try to protect themselves by trying to defund the NSA programs by proposing a new bill? There's public outrage which they can use for their own benefit and they could easily frame this as defending the American citizens while covering their own asses, but they're not doing that either. In fact, the amendment that was proposed to defund the NSA phone surveillance didn't pass, so what's going on?
Also, blackmail isn't that easy. If something embarrassing is revealed about a politician who seemed to be critical of the NSA, you think people wouldn't start pointing fingers to the NSA and accusing them of blackmail?
Its always easier to not upset the apple cart. And as another poster rightly said, this could easily be a two way process. A given politician likely doesn't need a NSA crusade for votes, if (s)he has already won a seat, jobs already done. No need for public out rage to generate quick votes.
As for your blackmail not easy point... no, its not. You are correct. But while there is this sort of hidden balance, out right blackmail and reveal threats are not necessary. If this is happening, it would be far more subtle and nuanced than a black and white situation. Heh, just like the situation we are all in now, a perception of all reaching surveillance leafs us to cowering fear. We are all, including politicians and NSA types, are human.
I'm reminded of Brezhnev's niece Luba, who was beaten when she was pregnant by the KGB, to the point of inducing miscarriage. It seemed as much a signal to Brezhnev as to Luba that even he couldn't protect her.
Interesting. It being the KGB it's also post-Stalin, as in the period after which the nomenklatura agreed they wouldn't use Leninist/Stalinist terror against each other. Yet per her Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luba_Brezhneva) she was a member of it, e.g. she describes the two-tier system of shops which kept the people extra busy (the counterrevolutionary devil finds work for idle hands) and the nomenklatura in tall cotton.
We don't know they do blackmail, either. What is this fearmongering bullshit? We also don't know unicorns don't exist, and these rocks I'm holding here will ward off tigers.
Although I suspect you didn't actually read what I posted fully.....
Yes we do know they do blackmail. Its one of the things we know very well. It is what happened through out the cold war. Blackmail is a tried and tested method, as old as it gets in intelligence and espionage.
BTW, have to ask. Would this have been your reply if a year ago I told you the NSA were spying in a comprehensive, industrial way on the American public? Would you have claimed it was fear mongering "bullshit", and banging on about mythical creatures?
Do you have evidence that the NSA is blackmailing members of congress into continuing to fund the NSA's projects?
And the "fear mongering bullshit" I referenced earlier has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the NSA is spying on US citizens, and everything to do with the fact that you're lying about having knowledge that the NSA is blackmailing congress.
"In early July, Grayson had staffers distribute to House members several slides published by the Guardian about NSA programs as part of Grayson's efforts to trigger debate in Congress. But, according to one staff member, Grayson's office was quickly told by the House Intelligence Committee that those slides were still classified, despite having been published and discussed in the media, and directed Grayson to cease distribution or discussion of those materials in the House, warning that he could face sanctions if he continued."
Well, since we're having a merry old time stomping all over the Constitution, I suppose asking what ramifications could possibly befall this Representative, considering the "Speech and Debate" immunity provided under Article 1, Section 6 of our allegedly-cherished Constitution, is a moot point. This is why it's probably best that I'm not in Congress, since I'd like to think that my response would have been "so?", followed by my continuing to press the issue. Sens. Wyden and Udall didn't take such a course, so I assume the consequences would have been dramatic.
Where is the StackOverflow for upcoming bills? There should be a simple site (which I may have to make myself) where people can vote on bills they think are important and draw attention to them.
For the uninvolved citizen, they could visit the site and see that [something like] SOAP 2.0 is voted most important to watch. They could then cast their own disproving vote for the bill, which the site would track so that come election time a notice such as "Senator John votes in accordance with your votes 20% of the time."
The user could easily express their opinions, the site would remember their opinions, and would tell the user when their representatives did not represent them.
Personally, I don't know what bills are important, and even if I did I wouldn't remember how my Senator voted 5 years from now when he's up for reelection.
>For the uninvolved citizen, they could visit the site and see that [something like] SOAP 2.0 is voted most important to watch. They could then cast their own disproving vote for the bill, which the site would track so that come election time a notice such as "Senator John votes in accordance with your votes 20% of the time."
Can I just point something out here? This doesn't want to be a website. It wants to be a piece of software. You don't want to create a website that records everybody's preferences and creates a big database for the NSA to suck up over the wire and discover everyone who doesn't like them.
So do it the other way. Have a piece of software that downloads the public information (what the bills are and how your reps voted) but keep all the data about the user's preferences on the local machine. If you want to do statistics and publish them, look into homomorphic encryption and do it P2P. You can get aggregate numbers that way without revealing any individual's preferences.
Although, I was picturing something more "dumbed down" like StackOverflow. I didn't see any important issues mentioned on the front page. It took me a few tries before I could find a link to important issues. I ended up clicking the "Get Started" button which I expected to take me to a registration page asking for my personal information. The "Get Started" link did take me to important issues though. Upon closer inspection, I do like the site.
Yeah, it isn't so easy to get to the important issues ... seems like their expectations is that users already know what bill they want to comment on when they get there. So, okay, not Stack Overflow yet. But more positively they've done a good job looking at it from the congressional staffers' perspective as well.
Congress doesn't have to look at it, enough voters have to look at it.
This is what political parties and eeeevil special interest groups that are powerful through the votes they influence do. In the case I'm most familiar with, the NRA's political lobbying arm (and eeeevil 501(c)(4)) grades politicians, and will send out alerts for the more important elections (as well as actions on bills). Many former politicians who were send back home to spend more time with their families in part due to NRA and general gun owner action can attest to the effectiveness of this.
The same could happen in this area, the first vote on it was extremely encouraging.
You're right, though I wasn't thinking of penalties outside of Congress. Congress can only go so far as to expel a member, right, or can they put a sitting Representative up for impeachment? Assuming they can, I suspect the fallout from that would be...impressive.
More likely is that the party leadership would not let them on any of the important committees. Or they may via backchannels fund a primary challenger.
This article is amazing. If you didn't read: two things it claims about the House intelligence oversight committee are:
* That it censored a congressman from discussing the contents of the Snowden leaks with other representatives (search for "sanctions")
* That this chairman allegedly made up a secret committee vote that didn't happen, and that in practice he can get away with this (search for "voice vote")
I hope Greenwald gets his chance to the hearing. So convenient for Obama to cancel his hearing [1], so they won't be able to have one until Congress gets back to work, so they have plenty of time to strategize against him, and get the politicians they need on their side.
If a congress person has balls they will risk everything to let the people know what is being done in secret to them. But it's tough to have balls when they would be happy if you deposited them in Guantanamo once you leave office. But the people who started this country didn't care what happened to them either when they took on the most powerful country on the planet. That's the kind of leader it would be nice to find.
Given that the NSA and it's sister organisations are now being squeezed, politically, what do you think their response will be?
Of course, the proper, professional and legitimate response is to sit back and to let the democratic process run it's course. We all hope and trust that this is what will happen.
However, given the resources at their disposal, it is not too difficult to speculate about what they might do (or be tempted to do) to secure their budget and to maintain their surveillance capabilities.
Similarly, after the current round of outrage and media attention has died down, what do you think that they will do to prevent something like this from happening again?
Beyond measures to prevent further leaks (that we already know they are considering) ... how might the technology that underpins tools such as Prism and XKeyScore be used to manipulate public opinion, to neutralise or mitigate the impact of those espousing hostile opinions, and to promote and spread a friendly point of view?
I am specifically thinking of man-in-the-middle attacks to manipulate messages and web-pages in-flight, to implement a sort of third-party hell-ban attack on activists and commentators. Is this possible without the collusion of the publisher?
Even if they were properly informed, doesn't Congress currently have something like a mid-teens approval rating? While they obviously should be overseeing everything that's going on, a rating like that doesn't exactly exude confidence from the American public that they'd even know what to do given the opportunity to do so.
It looks like these requests are being denied by the intelligence committee; do the asking members of Congress have the requisite security clearances? If so, I wonder if by law this information is restricted to members of the committee.
Ok, you guys are kind of blowing this way out of proportion. This is absolutely standard -- whenever classified information is disclosed unintentionally, you aren't allowed to discuss it in a non-secure compartmented facility. There are tons of reasons, starting with:
-Limiting exposure of the information already divulged
-Preventing further (especially unintentional) classified information spills
-Limiting adversaries collecting on what information and to what degree people are knowledgeable about
The fact is, if you're a legislator who is given compartmented access, you should know better than to propagate information that has been unintentionally released. For one, it promotes discussion of classified information in unclassified spaces. Secondly, it gives apparent validation to information that might not necessarily be true.
It's getting really tiresome reading these flavor-of-the-day NSA bashing articles, having worked at NSA and having eaten of the tree of knowledge. The intelligence community does not dictate foreign policy or collection policies. They serve at the direction of the federal government under the DNI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligen...), who is appointed by the president. They carry out the tasks that are given to them under the direction of the administration. There exists a feedback system which allows agencies to understand what information was vital in helping make decisions and what information wasn't important.
Here comes the tricky part: politicians clamor for more information in order to make better informed decisions -- just look at the situation with the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria. When intelligence agencies don't come up with anything actionable, politicians ask "Why not?", to which the agencies respond, "We don't have enough access to real time information.", or "You stated that X mission wasn't important so we stopped supporting it.". Then the politicians rewrite legislation in order to prevent further roadblocks to obtaining information in a timely manner with which they can make decisions.
All of that happens, and you want to blame an intelligence agency for doing its job at various levels of efficiency? In that entire process, the agency only gives feedback as to what its capabilities are and what it needs in order to increase its capabilities. The administration and legislators determine the scope of the work which the agencies function in.
There is no secret conspiracy, people. It's a very simple system: you vote in people and then tell them that you want the prevention of terrorist attacks prioritized above funding NASA. The public is then made aware to what degree the politicians were willing to go to in order to expand intelligence powers, so outrage ensued. Now, there is legislation being pushed forward (not successfully yet) in order to limit the powers. Is this not a representative democracy working to correct its mistakes and push towards a more perfect union?
I'm sympathetic to this as I may know people who work at various DOD subsidiaries, and they are good people. That said, to deny there are no sociopathic power seekers in these organizations is just naive. Giving an absolute power that can so easily be abused to any organization is a terrible idea. Even if today they are lead by a metaphorical holy, righteous person, tommorow they may not be, and when such a change occurs it won't be announced like some cartoon villain holding a press conference declaring their evil plans for all to see. I agree that congress, at least certain members of it, those privy to this information, have no legitimate claim to ignorance and outrage (okay, maybe the former), but I see the bigger problem being a program like what is alleged is even allowed to be set up. They claim there is strict oversight/auditing of data, and while I have no doubts this is technically true, I highly doubt it is the story "on the ground", just based on my knowledge of human nature and large scale organizations.
Well they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions are certainly no excuse for allowing a system to be set up which can easily be abused to catastrophic effect and is near impossible to dismantle, even by its authors. That's particularly so for intelligence services of all people, who are supposed to apply some level of insight into risk. This looks like either a case of incompetence or malice and frankly I'm not sure which is more disturbing.
These folks need to suck it up and go out on just a bit of a limb for the sake of our democracy. That is the oath they took and they bear much of the responsibility for allowing things to reach this point in the first place. If a 29 year old can risk his life and give up any chance of seeing home again to do the right thing, these supposed representatives of our interests can take a much, much smaller risk and do the same.