So, after sweeping up the gigantic Snow job the WA Post and the Guardian dumped on us,

[pnwmom]

it strongly appears that the NSA is doing the same things any informed person (who was paying attention during the Patriot Act hearings) knew it was doing:

Collecting phone numbers, including those of US citizens, and analyzing them for patterns related to possible terrorist activity; but going before a judge to demonstrate probable cause before getting a warrant for further investigation. (As opposed to the Bush-era practice of warrantless wiretapping.)

Spying on emails, phone calls, etc. of foreign nationals who are suspected of terrorist activity, using US and foreign data channels. (the "Prism" program)


So that was engineered Scandal #4. Is it time for #5?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/snowden-powerpoint/

[Enrique]

1. Clapper denied under oath that it was happening

Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Clapper: "No, sir."

[pnwmom]

7. I think he meant data beyond the phone numbers, which are not associated

with any particular American within the database.

He didn't dispute that phone numbers were collected.

[Enrique]

9. "any type of data at all"

he denied they were collecting "any data at all" on millions of Americans. Thus debunking your argument that any informed citizen should have known.

[randome]

18. And they likely were not collecting it.

You get a hard drive from Verizon, say, and run your pattern matching program on it. It spits out the numbers you want then you destroy the hard drive or return it to Verizon.

I don't see that this is 'collecting' unwanted data at all.

[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
[hr]

[rhett o rick]

26. I cant believe the rationalizations here. The government is collecting massive data but not using

all of it. They are only using the part they want (and we trust that they only want the stuff on the bad guys). And you want to believe they will destroy massive data they collected.

I believe that Eliot Spitzer was exposed for having a mistress because someone decided they "needed the data" from that massive database collected. They needed it for political purposes. They ended his political career.

[phleshdef]

34. Eliot Spitzer ended Eliot Spitzer's political career by being really, really stupid.

I don't even think he would try to argue with that.

Aside from that, the way the data is used, it makes sense. If someone is a suspected terrorist, they want to see who that person has been communicating with in the recent past... so they want the data available for if and when that happens. I agree with the notion that perhaps what they are doing is too broad, but I also understand the reason behind doing so.

[rhett o rick]

35. The data collected to fight terrorism was used to destroy his career.

The fact he had a mistress was no one's business. But our government wanted him silenced so they used their power of surveillance to ruin him. It's a powerful tool.

[former9thward]

41. He didn't have a "mistress", he had a call girl.

Which he had prosecuted others for. But for him to have one is "no one's business".....

[rhett o rick]

53. I dont disagree that he was not a nice man. I disagree with the illegal means used to

expose him. If he broke the law he should be punished but that doesnt justify using illegal means to find out. We used to have a Constitution.

[former9thward]

54. I totally agree with you about the illegal 'data mining' and the Constitution.

[phleshdef]

47. LOL "mistress", more like a hooker he was paying tens of thousands of dollars.

[rhett o rick]

52. So are you justifying how that information was obtained? Dont you see that data mining

can be used to destroy political opponents? Just because someone is guilty of a crime doesnt justify using illegal means to find that out. Or maybe you think the Constitution is to cumbersome.

[msanthrope]

48. He had a 22 year-old prostitute. Not a mistress. nt

[DisgustipatedinCA]

58. Bull fucking shit

[Xipe Totec]

2. Yea, I know. They're trying to ruin Obama's chances of reelection. nt

[DCBob]

4. They are trying to damage Democrats.

[FLyellowdog]

6. Exactly! eom

[uponit7771]

61. ...well dang it, we should just trust their motives then shouldn't we?

[BeyondGeography]

3. I think they're back to targeting Hillary

She didn't want to investigate diplomats paying for sex or some such atrocity.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. Is this the same Hillary who voted for and vocally backed Bush's wars?

[rhett o rick]

28. The Ruling Elites love Ms. Clinton. We are toast. nm

[mike_c]

5. no, what we reasonable people believed the NSA was doing has been vindicated...

...by public disclosures. This isn't a "manufactured scandal," no matter how much pro-surveillance propagandists might want to paint it that way. This is a radical departure from the fourth amendment, performed in secret without any informed debate. The rock of federal power has been lifted, just enough to glimpse some of the ugliness that lives beneath it and props it up. Those who claim "this is nothing new, so move along" have suspect agendas, IMO.

[liberal_at_heart]

8. It would be nice to have some democratic politicians come out against this so we could

have someone to vote for in 2014. But then again education is still on the chopping block, so until they fund education I'm still probably not going to be voting democrat.

[think]

13. You mean like Al Gore , Mark Udall, and Ron Wyden?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/udall-wyden-obama-nsa_n_3405384.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/al-gore-nsa-phone-records_n_3394043.html

[liberal_at_heart]

16. cool. At least someone is willing to go against the grain of popularity.

[pnwmom]

15. Which part of it will cause you to withhold your vote and why did you vote in 2012?

Are you against US phone numbers being collected? (Which you should have known about since the Patriot Act was first approved.)

Or are you against spying on foreign nationals suspected of terrorism?

[liberal_at_heart]

21. I'm not getting in a back in forth. I don't think it is right, plain and simple.

You are not going to convince me it is.

[Monkie]

36. i didnt know that drinking koolaid could make someone blind and deaf?

it was made very clear by the leaks that the NSA was collecting everything when it comes to foreign nationals with the collusion of those "beacons of freedom" otherwise know as google, yahoo, microsoft, apple. some of those foreign nationals are meant to be your friends and partners. did you look at the leaked slides? see the countries being targeted?
200 billion separate data points a month, every month, breaking european law and international law, there will be consequences for those companies and the american economy.

[pnwmom]

10. They openly debated doing what they are doing before the Patriot law was passed

so this IS a manufactured scandal. The swirl of false details was part of the smoke and mirrors.

I think it's fine if we go back and re-debate these issues, but thanks to this manufactured scandal many people have gotten the impression that Obama is doing something new or worse than the Patriot Act allows him to.

[eissa]

11. Just listened to Jeremy Bash

a former CIA official, who more or less laughed off most of Snowe's claims. Said while the government can track communications and look for patterns, actually listening in still required a warrant. He doubted other claims Snowe made as well, specifically his boasting that he could tap into the President's phone, or that he knew where all of our missions were. Said that he (Bash) worked with the director of the CIA and never had that info, strongly doubted a contract worker did.

Calling him a whistleblower is an insult to real whistleblowers. He wasn't revealing anything illegal, he's a Paul-bot with delusions of grandeur.

[Nye Bevan]

12. So if it's all stuff we knew anyway, Snowden has nothing to be worried about.

Right?

[Life Long Dem]

31. Just because someone already robbed the same bank...

He has nothing to worry about.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

14. I feel better already. If Bush started it then it must be awesome.

Having a Democratic administration continue and expand it just makes it that much more awesome.

[pnwmom]

17. Bush was doing warrantless wiretapping. He wasn't in favor of losing that power. n/t

[Nuclear Unicorn]

23. I'm sure a Reagan appointee like Vinson would bless off on a Bush-era warrant.

So any similar programs under Bush that obtained a warrant would be a credit to his administration. Right?

[DirkGently]

20. Besides breaking the law (again) in 2011, and

the administration fighting in court to prevent anyone from knowing how, or what it's doing differently, you mean.

None of this transparent shrugging / screeching / smearing is working, you know.

Try the "Snowden is a Bush family plant" thing. That's your best bet right there.

[pnwmom]

33. How did the Obama administration break the law in 2011?

[DirkGently]

38. We don't know; they won't say. But we know they did.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022981063

[Aerows]

45. I've been asking them to get a new talking point

for days, because none of the shit they are shoveling is working, because it's still horsehit.

[DirkGently]

56. It's kind of sad. First the attempted shrugs. Then shooting the messenger.

Currently, I'm discussing with various people here their claims that Glen Greenwald is a "shill" for Bush because he once, in a preface to his book attacking Bush, admits to trusting him on Iraq. Another poster believes Snowden was a "plant" for some kind of Bush family / Chinese conspiracy situation.

Recently there have been those "X% of Democrats approve of Obama posts. You know, because polling data must be the entire point of any discussion that touches on the President.

These are not arguments. They are reflexive attacks on anything challenging what I suppose must be a conceit that anything that suggests, or could possibly be read to suggest, that the Obama administration has failed to do the right thing in any situation must be destroyed without thought.

Thing is, it's not particularly about Obama. It's the shady infrastructure Bush built that, like so many of Bush / Cheney's destructive paradigms, have not yet been brought down.

I can't imagine why someone would put hero-worship of a Democratic president over trying to complete the mission for which we elected Obama in the first place.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

22. Easy solution, get Obama to tell the NSA to stop doing "the same things".

[snappyturtle]

24. I think what's happening as more people are waking up is

a discussion of what we know the NSA has been doing all along is right and if it's the way we want to live....finally.

[pnwmom]

32. And I welcome that discussion, and possible changes or even repeal of the Patriot Act.

But I don't welcome all the smoke and mirrors that accompanied this fake scandal. Obama hasn't been doing anything that he wasn't legally authorized to do, and that informed citizens (like most DUers) wouldn't have known about. But there was a lot of disinformation spread about this in the first days after the story broke that made it appear he had.

[snappyturtle]

39. I think the disconnect that has occurred between the President

and some DUer's (me included) is that he hasn't aggressively tried to halt or repeal the loss of civil liberties since 9/11. He should have explained to the country what was going on under the guise of transparency which he promised us. Why could he do it in the last day or two and not years ago? So I can understand folks' displeasure. Yes, WE knew about it and I remember Duers upset over FISA, The Patriot Act, the NDAA, etc. It's finally coming together and more are learning.

As far as fake scandal, I think as the story unfolds we'll learn more to make a judgement on that.

[liberal_at_heart]

44. exactly.

[Bluenorthwest]

25. You say everyone knew, DiFi says revealing it was treason. Two messages do not mesh.

Sadly for those of you to the far right in the Democratic Party, this is where you have to stand with Republicans while the rest of us stand with the Constitution and all. It's part of being a 'centrist' you know, sometimes you will proudly stand with Lindsay Graham and this is the issue that shows us that Blue Baggers and Tea Dogs have much in common. Blue Dogs and Tea Baggers? Either way it works.

[pnwmom]

29. There's no contradiction. Snowden wouldn't be in trouble if he discussed

the already known details that came to light during the Patriot Act hearings.

He's in trouble because he handed over classified files to people who weren't authorized to receive them.

You do realize you're proudly standing with Glenn Beck, don't you? Politics makes strange bedfellows.

[Aerows]

40. Sure there is

You are just full of baloney, and are trying to play it partisan. Democrats don't like being lied to. We aren't Republicans, after all, and you won't turn us into people that like to be lied to.

[pnwmom]

43. If you don't like being lied to, then you should be unhappy

about the misleading coverage of the WA Post on the prism program, which was falsely touted as collecting information on Americans.

[Aerows]

46. I know what horseshit smells like

so when someone shovels it, I'm not going to call it chocolate.

[Bluenorthwest]

42. I follow politics, not manmen, so I know I stand with my Democratic Senators Merkley and Wyden

and I know who in the Senate you stand with. Your pundits and celebrity chatter boxes are of zero interest to me.
To me this is not about Obama, this is about bad policy that has not been properly dealt with which mostly comes from Bush days. Dealing with these ongoing questions and challenges does not have to do harm to the President's standing, this is the sort of thing he's good at actually. It has to be done, we can't just let this roll on with people left entirely out of the loop and Congress feeling under informed. There is no need to do that.
I think it is a complex issue needs to be discussed even if it is hard and makes people uncomfortable. That's what I think. It is bigger than any elected officer, and Obama is capable of this discussion.

But 'everybody knew this' is contradictory to 'it was treason to speak of this'. It just is. Cake and eat it arguments are a Tea Dog, Blue Bagger specialty.

[neverforget]

59. They can't explain our Senators outrage so they don't talk about it. I asked a poster yesterday

and they said was that this program has been around since 2007 which doesn't explain why they are outraged. If it's old news, why the outrage?

[former9thward]

49. Are Al Gore , Mark Udall, and Ron Wyden Glen Beck followers now?

[Number23]

27. The program is disturbing but it ain't new and it has bi-partisan support

Even the Washington Post, the paper that broke this story, has openly acknowledged that this likely won't hurt the president. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/06/07/why-the-nsa-revelations-arent-like-the-irs-scandal-or-benghazi-for-obama/

"Sixty-eight percent of the public said it’s more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if it intrudes on personal privacy"

This mess is entirely legal and we allowed it. All of the hooping and hollering now is just INSANE.

[boilerbabe]

30. what the fuck ever pmwmom. they only people poo pooing this are you

"Obama can do no wrong" types.

[Aerows]

37. I couldn't even

shuffle my feet enough to clear this us. :scuffs feet on the floor, grins:

Good luck wiping this one away. I'm a Democrat, but I detest liars with my entire being. Go down with the ship, but don't bullshit, because that makes me sick.

[FSogol]

50. #5 is Acorn!

or Fluoride in our drinking water!

The 2014 midterms aren't going to suppress themselves.

[Lady Freedom Returns]

51. The House still have to vote for thier big cut to Food Stamps.

So I say get ready for Scandal #6 & 7.

[TheKentuckian]

55. A warrant for everyone on Verizon or Sprint or whatever is not a warrant

There can be no plausible reasonable suspicion of everyone. Anybody pushing such nonsense is a traitor not just to the constitution but to the idea of a free people.

No honor, no principles, no sense of honesty, and sell outs to people that have sacrificed and died over hundreds of years to punt it back first by the slackjawed Bush Worshipers and now again with the Obama choir backed by the statist suckers (some of who were probably Bushies as well).

Lower than low, and a spot deep, deep in hell well earned.

[quakerboy]

57. Spying on us is wrong

Is it happening or not?

If its happening, or if tools that allow it are in place without transparency and accountability, then its wrong.
If its not, then its not and the whole issue is moot.

[neverforget]

60. What business is it of the government who I call, when I call and for how long I talk to them?

Please explain that. I'm interested to know why the government needs to know this.