The Atlantic: "Lawbreaking at the NSA: Bring On a New Church Committee"

[99th_Monkey]

Lawbreaking at the NSA: Bring On a New Church Committee
The Washington Post has revealed an audit documenting thousands of abuses per year. An exhaustive investigation is long overdue -- and Ron Wyden should lead it.
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF * The Atlantic * AUG 16 2013, 6:34 AM ET

The time is ripe for a new Church Committee, the surveillance oversight effort named for Senator Frank Church, who oversaw a mid-1970s investigation into decades of jaw-dropping abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. If recent stories about the NSA don't alarm you, odds are that you've never read the Church Committee findings, which ought to be part of the standard high-school curriculum. Their lesson is clear: Under cover of secrecy, government agents will commit abuses with impunity for years on end, and only intrusive Congressional snooping can stop them.

Why is another Church Committee needed now? For more than a decade, the NSA has repeatedly engaged in activity that violated the law and the Constitutional rights of many thousands or perhaps millions of Americans.

Let's review the NSA's recent history of serial illegality. President George W. Bush presided over the first wave. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, he signed a secret order that triggered a massive program of warrantless wiretapping. NSA analysts believed they possessed the authority to spy on the phone calls and emails of American citizens without a judge's permission. Circa October 2001, 90 NSA employees knew about the illegal program, but the public didn't. Later that month, four members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, were told of its existence, and subsequently discredited White House lawyer John Yoo wrote the first analysis of its legality. By 2002, 500 people knew about it, at which point telecom providers were participating.

The public didn't find out about warrantless wiretapping until December 2005, more than four years after it started, when the New York Times published a story that they'd long been holding.

How effective was the illegal spying?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/lawbreaking-at-the-nsa-bring-on-a-new-church-committee/278750/

[KG]

1. they never loved him anyway

[Autumn]

2. Recommended

Because it is time. Now.

[Cooley Hurd]

3. Kick and REC!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Church#Warning_about_the_NSA

Warning about the NSA
Church was stunned by what the Church Committee learned about the immense operations and electronic monitoring capabilities of the National Security Agency (NSA), an agency whose existence was unknown to most Americans at the time. Church stated in 1975: "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide." He is widely quoted as also stating regarding the NSA: "I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge... I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Commentators such as U.S. constitutional lawyer and columnist Glenn Greenwald have praised Church for his prescient warning regarding this turning around by the NSA to monitor the American people, arguing that the NSA undertook such a turning in the years after the September 11 Attacks.

[mindwalker_i]

4. No

We only prosecute people who smoke pot.

[Logical]

5. So true!! n-t

[KarKar]

6. I never knew The Atlantic was so racist

[99th_Monkey]

7. And "closet Libertarians" too.

I suspect that they secretly "admire Ron Paul"

[KarKar]

8. Yeah. it reads like copy

straight from Rand Paul's Chief of Staff's intern's second cousin's desk. No worries, all it will take is for INFOWARS to link to it and the reasonable Dems will be able to discredit it in no time flat.

[L0oniX]

9. K & R ...uhm ...is the NSA recording my K & R?

[Fearless]

10. Yes.

[Demo_Chris]

11. yes

[cantbeserious]

12. Kick And Recommend

eom

[WillyT]

13. HUGE K & R !!!

[DirkGently]

14. Time to disinfect with a little sunshine.

Tear it all open. Expose it. Shut most of it down.

Start over under the principles that are supposed to be in place to begin with.

[99th_Monkey]

15. Yep, that's the idea. Let's just hope & pray it keeps growing legs fast.

And help keep the pressure & attention on the real issues of course.

[DirkGently]

16. Glad to see the attempts at sweeping it under the rug

have gone so ... poorly.

[99th_Monkey]

17. It must be difficult to win an argument

when you don't have even one leg to stand on.