Barry's feeble excuses for peeping

Think agan: Barack Obama, not so Bush lite, after all. (Image courtesy of salon.com.)

Not overlooking the Orwellian connection, Maureen Dowd nailed Barry, the not so Bush Lite, yesterday for his recently exposed peeping policies in her NY Times op-ed:

 WASHINGTON — THE acid that corroded George W. Bush’s presidency was fear — spreading it and succumbing to it. 

You could see the fear in his eyes, the fear that froze him in place, after Andy Card whispered to W. in that Florida classroom that a second plane had crashed into the twin towers. 

The blood-dimmed tragedy of 9/11 was chilling. But instead of rising above the fear, W. let it overwhelm his better instincts. He and Dick Cheney crumpled the Constitution, manipulated intelligence to go to war against a country that hadn’t attacked us, and implemented warrantless eavesdropping — all in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists. 

Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans. That is why Barack Obama was so stirring in 2007 with his spirited denunciations of W.’s toxic trade-offs. The up-and-coming senator and former constitutional law professor railed against the Bush administration’s “false choice, between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” 

Now that we are envisioning some guy in a National Security Agency warehouse in Fort Meade, Md., going through billions of cat videos and drunk-dialing records of teenagers, can the Ministries of Love and Truth be far behind?

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.” “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.” 

It was quaint to think we had any privacy left, once Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram braided themselves into our days and nights.

As Gene Hackman, playing a disillusioned N.S.A. analyst in the 1998 movie “Enemy of the State” put it, the agency has been in bed with the telecommunications industry for decades, and “they can suck a salt grain off a beach.”

Still, it was a bit of a shock to find out that No Such Agency, as the N.S.A. is nicknamed, has been collecting information for seven years on every phone call, domestic and international, that Americans make. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who first reported the collection of data from Verizon, called the N.S.A. “the crown jewel in government secrecy.”

The Washington Post and then Greenwald swiftly revealed another secret program started under Bush, code-named Prism, that lets the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. tap Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, lifting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails and documents in an effort to track foreign targets

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The Post reported that the career intelligence officer who leaked the information was appalled and considered the program a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

President Obama defended his classified programs even as Greenwald spilled one more bequeathed from W.: identifying targets overseas for potential cyberattacks. So much technological overreach, yet counterterrorism officials still couldn’t do basic police work and catch the Boston bombers before the marathon by following up on warnings from the Russians.

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Obama loses credibility over Verizon call data

The media failed in vetting the candidacy of Barack Obama in 08. In the process it banned racism while unleashing every sexist ploy in the book against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and effectively targeting John McCain with ageism in the general election. (You have to ask: why can't guys like David Axelrod understand that bigotry is bigotry, and every version of it is immoral?)

Held up by his campaign as the harbinger of the new politics, Barack Obama appeared to be destined to clear out all corruption and unite Washington. And oh, yes, he would bring complete transparency to our government.

Although the media is still somewhat sluggish in covering the Obama Administration, it has evidently begun to wake up. Sitting here with my Verizon cell phone at hand, you bet I’m annoyed at the latest revelation of the administration’s invasion of my privacy. And yours.

However, I am rather pleased to see the NY Times editorial board has chosen to voice its displeasure:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counter terrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. 

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers. 

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