Crazy traitor leaker got Congress to notice vast surveillance state By Alex Pareene

[Douglas Carpenter]

Pols from both parties are all of a sudden demanding more transparency and pushing reforms. Thanks, leaks!


(Credit: Reuters/Bobby Yip)

There is a guy, a famous guy, who lives now in a Russian airport or something, no one is really sure, but everyone in the media (and lots of people not in the media) cannot stop fighting and arguing about this guy. Some people say he is a jerk and crazy and bad and others say he is a hero and super cool. Either way, mean jerk or cool hero, this guy that everyone won’t shut up about is actually responsible for the first major public displays of Congressional opposition to the unchecked surveillance state in 35 years or so.

Congress has always had a handful of privacy advocates and true civil libertarians. But for many years in political Washington it has been considered foolish and perhaps a bit treasonous to suggest that our intelligence agencies are even slightly overzealous in their collection of all information possible about everything on the globe. That is still the general consensus, but as McClatchy’s Washington Bureau wrote on Friday, there are suddenly a bunch of members of Congress who actually want to rein in the NSA.

The last time a significant number of Washington politicians favored additional restrictions on intelligence-gathering and surveillance powers was in the immediate aftermath of the Church Committee reports, in the mid-1970s. Since then, Congress has practically abandoned its oversight power over the intelligence communities, and it’s only gotten worse since 9/11. Fighting terrorism trumped privacy every time Congress was asked to expand government spying powers. For much of the last dozen years, civil libertarians weren’t just ignored by the political establishment, they were vilified. When Democrats took full control of Congress, they still rubber-stamped Bush’s surveillance programs.

So what happened, exactly? Well, the American people learned a bunch of scary sounding stuff about how much data the NSA is collecting, on everyone. They learned this because of illegal leaks of classified information, to reporters, from the guy everyone is fighting about. Everyone can keep fighting about the guy, I guess, but no one can now say that the guy’s leaks were entirely gratuitous. Because before the leaks, people who were alarmed at what the intelligence agencies could be up to were ignored and politicians who had pretty good notions of what they could be up to (or who could’ve learned what they were up to if they cared to) weren’t concerned.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/22/crazy_traitor_leaker_got_congress_to_notice_vast_surveillance_state/?source=newsletter

[burnodo]

1. No no...he's a traitor

Our government does not do bad things...ever!

[Wilms]

3. I disagree.

Our government does bad things. But when it gets caught, it's OK to do those things afterall.

[sabrina 1]

5. Well, you're almost right. Our government DOES do bad things, but then they pass laws

making those BAD things GOOD things so when you turn around to find the bad things, you will be told that what they are doing is LEGAL.

You have to be very rich and very powerful to get Congress to CYA like that.

Iow, this democracy has become a joke.

[zbdent]

2. Likely only got legs in the "liberally-biased media" and Congressional outrage

because a Dem president "continued" what was put into hyperdrive by a Republican.

And Bush43 was doing it ILLEGALLY!!! (Just retro-actively "constitutional&quot

[Douglas Carpenter]

4. knr

[burnodo]

6. kick