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Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

nytimes.com

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Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#91

Post by abvdasker »

mbateman wrote: post #68

Everything that's wrong with the current intelligence approach in a sentence: "And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration." This completely vindicates Snowden's point about the current system being one of policy instead of law, and of enabling turnkey tyranny.

I think it's a symptom of corruption of the system's built-in checks and balances. The executive branch is much more powerful now than it used to be, and is the only branch that is composed entirely of a single party. The only politically homogenous branch is now far-and-away the most powerful.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#92

Post by grandalf »

psaintla wrote: post #71
grandalf wrote: post #3

The headline might as well be a more Onionesque "After gaining power, politician turns out not to actually hold the strongly principled views he expressed while campaigning". I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power. Generally speaking, the vast majority of power holders agree that aggressive spyin…

Does it really have to be that cynical? Don't you think it is entirely possible pre-2008 Obama's opinions were formed with the same information as the rest of us and post-2008 Obama received more information (national security briefings) that completely blew away his belief system? I don't agree with much of what the Obama administration has done regarding domestic and international surveillance but I always feel lik…

Good point. I used to be more sympathetic to that line of reasoning. It's tightly coupled to the argument for the existence of state secrets... granting the state the power not to act in a fully transparent manner.

How might any institution act if it wanted to earn the credibility to behave in a way that was non-transparent to its constituents?

A firm might pay out consistent dividends or go public and comply with the additional regulatory requirements. A government might declassify information as quickly as possible to prove that information was classified judiciously (once the classified status was no longer needed).

In the US, there is still lots of classified information that is decades old. Clearly the government feels no need to earn its credibility when it comes to what information may be classified and for what purpose (or for how long). For a long time this was fine b/c the public had no good reason not to trust.

Things like WikiLeaks and Snowden's leaks have given us insight into the kinds of things that are classified. The most damning in my opinion were the WikiLeaks revelations that information was classified during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that effectively filters out bad news from the information available to reporters. This is not judicious use of secrecy, it's using secrecy to achieve a propaganda motive.

Snowden's leaks reveal more than just the existence of a secret program, they reveal that the program was deliberately extralegal and far-reaching in a way that normal legal and law enforcement processes would never have allowed to happen.

It comes down to the question of whether we value (at a basic level) the rule of law, or if we prefer to be ruled by a trusted council of elders that makes secret decisions on our behalf without any kind of transparency or accountability.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#93

Post by lasermike026 »

The big lie is that surveillance has to do with nation security. It doesn't. You build a surveillance system to suppress political descent not stop terrorist attacks. Business has big plans and they don't want some republic to vote and screw things up for them. They have world to conquer. Follow the money.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#94

Post by ilovepolitics »

psaintla wrote: post #71
grandalf wrote: post #3

The headline might as well be a more Onionesque "After gaining power, politician turns out not to actually hold the strongly principled views he expressed while campaigning". I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power. Generally speaking, the vast majority of power holders agree that aggressive spyin…

Does it really have to be that cynical? Don't you think it is entirely possible pre-2008 Obama's opinions were formed with the same information as the rest of us and post-2008 Obama received more information (national security briefings) that completely blew away his belief system? I don't agree with much of what the Obama administration has done regarding domestic and international surveillance but I always feel lik…

It's a combination of hubris and intentional ignorance on the part of OP and others like him.

It's really fascinating to see otherwise intelligent people completely unable to challenge their own beliefs about the nature of the world.

Is Obama simply reacting to new information he has been made privy to since becoming the president? Is it possible that there are genuine threats to America that are not made public? Is it possible there are realities of foreign affairs that we may not understand?

No, the world is just as I conceive it and Obama is a liar prone to malfeasance.

Accepting otherwise would challenge the safe bubble of the reality I have constructed. One where everyone fundamentally shares my value system and I have the necessary information and skills of deduction to construct an accurate conception of reality.

I wonder if it's something particular to technically skilled people. They have a knack for figuring out things that most people in society don't care for or don't have the aptitude for so they assume that that applies to all things, even things outside of their sphere of experience or aptitude.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#95

Post by dllthomas »

aaronem wrote: post #69
mcv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course. Vote. For for better people. That is the basis of any democracy. You don't blindly follow your leaders, and you don't blame them for their mistakes and carry on as if there's nothing you can do about it, because you can do something about it. You can vote them out, and vote better people in. The fact that those three hundred million Americans…

A glib answer, to be sure. What do you recommend regarding the unelected civil service bureaucracy which has such a large hand in how the United States are administered? I can't imagine seeing any president take on the State Department, for example, but having seen at least one senator do so, I suspect I know who'd win.

One Senator wields 0.5% (ish) of the authority of a branch of government that State Department officials and staff don't (directly) work for. The President wields 100% of the authority of the branch of government that the State Department officials and staff work for. I think these things are different in both kind and degree.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#96

Post by crusso »

clarkmoody wrote: post #84
nsns wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power. " You've just described the current crisis of representational democracy.

I believe it's high time to repeal the 17th Amendment and return a fair bit of power to the states. This would ease the democracy crisis and decentralize some of the power from D.C.

Yeah, the power structure in DC has gotten way too comfortable for the people living there. Look at how unaffected the DC housing market was by the crisis over the last 6 years.

The people in Washington aren't going to relinquish any of their power, though. An Article V convention of the states is about the only hope.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/enacting_the_liberty_...

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#97

Post by wmeredith »

jasonlotito wrote: post #46
wmeredith wrote: post #37

“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting. The notion that we would put down a tool that would protect people here in America is hard to fathom.” That's the whole problem. The NSA spying is being sold as if it stops terrorist attacks. It does not. They have not cited a single incid…

I'm agains the NSA spying as well, but saying they haven't cited anything isn't the same thing as proving they haven't stopped terrorist attacks. Please don't read more into this than what I said.

The NSA existing in a state that doesn't stop terrorist attacks is the status quo (it's the same as them not existing at all). It doesn't need proving.

If they want to spy on everyone in the world all the time and their reasoning is that it makes Americans safer, then the burden of proof is very much on them.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#98

Post by mildavw »

The mere hand-wringing that current leaders are doing over this is so disturbing to me because of where I see it taking the country. It's not hard to imagine, say, Carl Rove or his ilk giving someone at the NSA a wink and a nod that they'll be taken care of if their candidate wins office. The NSA leaks or hands off information that tilts the election their way. Given that collection of all of this data is A-OK, no step in this process is blatantly illegal anymore. If I were Ron Wyden, this is what I'd be saying. "Do you want your representatives picked by the NSA? Because that's the logical path we're going down."

The ability read/listen to all electronic communication without warrants gives the NSA too much power for this not to happen.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#99

Post by aaronem »

kordless wrote: post #88
aaronem wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is fascinating how people lay blame. Oh, yes, very much so! For example, you seem quite effortlessly to lay blame on three hundred or so million people, and that's only counting those alive right now, with no consideration for those who've predeceased us, at least some of whom presumably could be expected, in your formulation, to have had a hand in creating the situation you so readily decry. But laying blame, w…

When you spot someone blaming, try not to assign blame when you reply. It interferes with forward movement in the conversation. Also, everyone makes mistakes every now and again. Shit happens.

I might be more amenable to an argument like this if I saw any possibility of "forward movement", as you describe it, existing in a conversation like this one. I don't, so I'm not; my participation is directed at the goal of amusing myself, nothing more.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#100

Post by [deleted] »

grandalf wrote: post #12
rayiner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about "majority of power holders agree" is so disingenuous. See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/05/poll-public-supports-nsa-sp... ("As we’ve written about before, the American public has widely supported the NSA’s activities before and after the scandal. I’m no fan of the secretive spying, but if the government appears to be acting slowly on surveillance reform, it could be because they’re responding to consti…

Most Americans learn about the issue from media stories created by firms owned by powerful interests, so public opinion is not surprising. If you look back at the early coverage of the Snowden leaks in the NY Times, the story was reported but the paper dutifully prepped a character assassination attack on Snowden himself, while intentionally suppressing the story of James Clapper's perjury and while also avoiding sug…

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