> "The executive branch has now confirmed that the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans' have been violated thousands of times each year,"
And you can bet that if they admitted to those, the real violations are orders of magnitude worse.
Nothing coming out from either the White House or NSA or other secret agencies will be taken seriously anymore. Whatever they release and say, at least in the next year or so related to the spying, is just going to be regarded as more PR and lies. They have completely lost any credibility.
Now the bad part -- this doesn't seem to bother them. That bill to defund the NSA was close but not close enough to scare them. Now, what could happen as a nasty side effect is they notice our apathy it will just embolden them.
Anyone notice any promises of them shutting down their operation? Nope. Neither have I. But one can bet they will ramp them up.
This is like the tiny criminal that when he finds out everyone knows about his crimes but nothing really comes out of it either through apathy or fear, they just ramp up the intensity.
"We record %2 percent of traffic and there wasn't that much outrage, why don't we just record 20%".
There use to be a rule that for each letter a congressman got, 100 of his constituents were thinking the same thing. So seeing the <NSA> admit to a mistake rounded down by ~ an order of magnitude is probably a decent guess (!).
My biggest personal problem with what the NSA is doing is that they find it OK to store any data, and are only applying the laws on queries. If you look at the violations, some are typos performed on searches. If the NSA never stored the data about Americans in the first place an overly broad typo in a search box wouldn't be an issue. I would like the law to include protection against having our information stored, not just viewed. And I also want protections for non-Americans that aren't legitimate targets. Why is nobody talking about not storing the information or the moral violations, if not legal violations, of collecting private data of innocent people who are not citizens?
Now add to this the fact that NSA shares information with DEA and IRS (at least, that is what is known, who knows what else exists), and both are trained to lie about where the information comes from as a matter of routine, and that information, as any other, once shared can not be unshared - and you have a nice unregulated channel here.
NSA analyst makes a "typo" and finds information on John Doe that, say, IRS wants. He then "mistakenly overshares" this information. Once it is detected, NSA instructs IRS to immediately forget the information, which they happily agree to do, though miraculously it turns out they've got exactly the same information by other, confidential, channel. Thus, no abuse of NSA facility ever happened, and IRS can continue with the investigation using this information - and no warrants or probably causes ever required.
Hang on a second, does this mean its ok to break the law "by accident" now? Because it sure looks that way to me. It looks like its now ok to go to great pains to make something really sophisticated that will undoubtedly break the law if used as is intended, and then "accidentally" use it as intended.
I hope everyone involved in this around the world realise they will go down in the history as the bad guys.
Maybe this sounds out here - given the history of the US government I don't think so - I fear for Wyden's safety. He keeps sticking his neck out there over and over again, pushing back against the intelligence system. It's an exceptionally powerful and threatening system, with a massive budget and influence (for example, lucrative CIA and NSA contracts can get very powerful and intelligent people, such as Larry Ellison, to talk completely insane gibberish about how Amex has tons of info on people and we should be more concerned about voluntary transactions than the NSA spying on us by force).
More reasonable than a physical attack is some sort of fabricated smear campaign. It need not even be untruthful - we've all got something embarrassing if you look deep enough, and the NSA can look pretty deep.
Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, and Jerry Litton come to mind, as possibilities. For the equal-opportunity crowd, there's Richard Obenshain and Ted Stevens on the right, as well as Barbara Olson (married to White House counsel, Ted Olson) who died in 9/11 on Flight 77 as it crashed into the Pentagon.
I neither believe that they were or weren't killed. I don't have strong feelings either way. Accidents do happen. And at the same time, plane crashes can be awfully convenient (read the opening of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).
However if I were to look for a list of candidates, including the possibility that 9/11 was a red flag operation (again, I don't generally suspect that it was, but stranger things have been proposed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods), that would be a good list to start with.
In established cases (though not "killed by the government"), the most recent assassination of a sitting Federal official was John Roll, a district judge in Arizona (killed in the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt) in 2011.
The most recently assassinated national legislator (sitting member of Congress) was Allard K. Lowenstein, a liberal Democrat representing Nassau County, New York (Long Island).
Prior to that, Leo Ryan (Jonestown), Robert Kennedy (assassinated while running for the Democratic Presidential ticket), JFK, and Huey Long, in 1935.
By my count: 19 Democratic officeholders and 8 Republicans have been assassinated.
You're moving the goal posts from 'politicians assassinated by the US Government' to 'politicians and officials who have been assassinated.' No one disputes that assassinations and attempted assassinations have taken place. But, sort of throwing up your hands and saying, "Accidents do happen [but] plane crashes can be awfully convenient," doesn't leave me any room to debate this topic with you. You can't have it both ways.
I'm saying if you want to find the government assassinations, here is where you'd look. Again, I'm not saying that these were assassinations (other than the ones which are commonly considered as such). But they're deaths in office.
Actually, I was a bit surprised that there were as few assassinations as there have been (what with some 500+ high national political figures at any one time). The Democrat/Republican balance is also interesting.
"Accidents do happen [but] plane crashes can be awfully convenient," doesn't leave me any room to debate this topic with you.
Believe it or not, I can accept issues as unresolved, though with shadings of possibility or probability one way or the other. When I say "I'm not convinced one way or the other", I mean just that. I've also not really put much time into looking at any of these incidents.
I do leave the possibility open in the case of Wellstone and Carnahan. The circumstances of Litton's death (how often to airplane crankshafts break spontaneously?) are interesting. Ryan and Jonestown: pretty clearly a cult.
There's also the case that there can be actions involving some elements of a government in opposition to others. As Kenneth Arrow observed, firms aren't single points, they're structures with internal complexity. As are governments. Operation Northwoods and The Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot) are both indications that plots have been hatched in the US. It can happen here, and very nearly has.
The circumstances surrounding both the Wellstone and Carnahan deaths were extremely politically charged. In Wellstone's case, former vice president Walter Mondale stood in as a candidate 11 days prior to the election. In Carnahan's, his name remained on the ballot and his wife served. There's relatively little dispute over the official investigation of the Wellstone incident, and some history of concerns with the principle pilot. As you may recall, Carnahan's opponent was John Ashcroft who went on to serve at Attorney General in the 2nd Bush Administration. In both cases (as now), control of the Senate was in play.
We have actually: People the world over are having far far fewer children. Almost all developed countries have < replacement rate population growth, and many developing countries are below that level as well
Turns out when given the option, women don't want 203948 kids.
Anybody with an IQ over 80 who's read the recent news about the mass surveillance in place had to reasonably assume that these privacy breaches are just 'the tip of the iceberg'.
The only new thing here is that 2 senators seem to have the balls to talk about it.
Besides that, nobody should trust Congress to resolve the real issues. Of course they'll try to sell this illusion to us, but the minds are already too corrupted.
And you can bet that if they admitted to those, the real violations are orders of magnitude worse.
Nothing coming out from either the White House or NSA or other secret agencies will be taken seriously anymore. Whatever they release and say, at least in the next year or so related to the spying, is just going to be regarded as more PR and lies. They have completely lost any credibility.
Now the bad part -- this doesn't seem to bother them. That bill to defund the NSA was close but not close enough to scare them. Now, what could happen as a nasty side effect is they notice our apathy it will just embolden them.
Anyone notice any promises of them shutting down their operation? Nope. Neither have I. But one can bet they will ramp them up.
This is like the tiny criminal that when he finds out everyone knows about his crimes but nothing really comes out of it either through apathy or fear, they just ramp up the intensity.
"We record %2 percent of traffic and there wasn't that much outrage, why don't we just record 20%".