Juan Cole: Top Ten Things That Don't Make Sense About Obama's Security State

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/424-national-security/18803-top-ten-things-that-dont-make-sense-about-obamas-security-state

1.The government says that they need everyone's phone records because they want to see who calls known overseas terrorists from the US. But if the NSA had a telephone number of a terrorist abroad and wanted to see if it was called from the US, why couldn't it just ask the telephone company for the record of everyone who called it? It isn't true that it would take too much time. It would be instant. Obviously, the government wants the telephone records of millions of Americans for some other reason.


2.If the real reason they are getting our phone records from the phone companies is to check for drug sales and other petty crime inside the US not related to terrorism, and if they are lying to judges about how they initially came to know of these crimes, aren't the NSA, DEA and other government officials violating the Constitutional guarantee of due process? Are they focusing on drug buys because law enforcement can confiscate the property of drug dealers, whereas busting other kinds of crime actually costs time and money? And, hasn't their dishonesty and its revelation just put in danger thousands of drug convictions?


3.If the NSA and FBI have all the phone records, bank account information and credit card transactions of everyone, why haven't they been able to find any bankers or financiers who engaged in illegal activity while they were plunging ordinary Americans into poverty and homelessness with the Depression of 2008-2009? After all, they seem to have been able to discover illegal activity by former New York governor Elliott Spitzer, by illegally spying on his bank accounts. Was Spitzer, who was trying to crack down on Wall Street, the only prominent figure in New York engaged in such activities? Maybe some Masters of the Universe on Wall Street were, too? Surely there are telephone, bank and credit card records showing the guilt of the latter?

Etc.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. The additional seven are also well worth reading.

[xchrom]

2. du rec.

[MannyGoldstein]

3. Let's be frank: the Spy On Everyone program is not useful for stopping terrorist attacks, but

is very useful for controlling Americans who our government and its purchasers find troublesome.

[uponit7771]

6. ...you forgot to add they does this "stopping" with the use of black helicopters and black drones

....and shit

[Junkdrawer]

8. Someday attacking people with derision and a "conspiracy theory" implication....

will get old.

Today just might be that day.

[Eddie Haskell]

11. American's suffer from the delusion that they live in a democratic society.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We live in a police state, and that won't change with party control, election finance reform, hand counted ballots, or any other such noble, but useless reforms. Those with the money will always corrupt the system.

[Junkdrawer]

12. We'll never know if those reforms will or won't work unless they're tried...

I'm told that there are nations in South America that have turned back their police states.

That said, collapse and anarchy seem more likely than reform in the US of A.

AND

For the most part, there was a time when the "reforms" were the common wisdom. That wealth was able to make open corruption the accepted norm does tend to strengthen your position.

[CakeGrrl]

17. Yeah, maybe the same day we stop hearing about

apologists,
quislings,
surveillance state defenders,
and so on.

Maybe today?

Maybe not.

[MannyGoldstein]

10. Well, we can agree that one of us needs to wake the #%^* up.

[caseymoz]

4. Strange, can't reach the link.

These days, that makes me suspicious.

[uponit7771]

5. "Obama's security state" cause it only started under Obama hunh?!............................ok

[burnodo]

15. So your argument is that Obama is blameless

because he didn't start the policies he's helping to enshrine?

[blackspade]

16. He is the president now.....

right?

So is he responsible for things that go on under his watch or not?

[RVN VET]

7. Spitzer!

He hits it right on the nose. Spitzer was mauling the crooked rats of Wall Street and got nailed for it. He was and remains a flawed hero of the common dude -- like me. I hope his climb back up the political ladder is a success and gives him a chance to join with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson and a (very small) handful of others in fighting the good fight against greed, corruption, and the 1% (but I repeat myself).

[forestpath]

9. K&R

[whttevrr]

13. 10 Why doesn't one of the telecoms...

10. Why doesn't one of the telecoms adopt a policy of destroying the records of where its customers have been, and who they called, immediately after each call- keeping only a record of how much the call cost? The government can't demand information that a company doesn't have. Wouldn't millions of consumers immediately switch to that carrier? Would the government allow the company to do this? If not, what happened to our Free Enterprise system? Ronald Reagan used to warn that if we gave the government too much power, one day we might suddenly wake up in the Soviet Union of America. Did we, this morning?

On Aug. 5, 1981, Ronald Reagan knee capped unions when he fired 11,345 air traffic controllers.

[blackspade]

14. +1000

[DirkGently]

18. Excellent points, all of them. n/t