Sen. Obama warned about Patriot Act abuses. President Obama proved him right.

[The Straight Story]

In recent months, Barack Obama has forcefully defended the use of the Patriot Act to gather the phone records of every American. But before he was elected president, he had a very different perspective on the issue.

In December 2005, Congress was debating the first re-authorization of the Patriot Act, a controversial 2001 law that gave the federal government expanded power to spy on Americans. And Barack Obama was one of nine senators who signed a letter criticizing the then-current version of the legislation for providing insufficient protections for civil liberties.

The senators focused on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to obtain “business records” that are “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. Sen. Obama and eight of his colleagues worried that the provision would “allow government fishing expeditions targeting innocent Americans. We believe the government should be required to convince a judge that the records they are seeking have some connection to a suspected terrorist or spy.”

Congress eventually re-authorized the Patriot Act, including Section 215. A few years later, Obama was elected president of the United States. And under President Obama’s watch, the NSA engaged in surveillance suspiciously similar to the broad “fishing expeditions” Sen. Obama warned about.

The government has argued that records of every phone call made in the United States are “relevant” to counter-terrorism investigations generally, allowing them to obtain information about the private phone calls of millions of Americans — exactly the kind of argument Sen. Obama warned the government would make if the language of Section 215 wasn’t tightened.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/02/sen-obama-warned-about-patriot-act-abuses-president-obama-proved-him-right/?wprss=rss_social-postbusinessonly&Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost&clsrd

[NewThinkingChance40]

1. Thats Washington politics.

Once someone has been there for a while, it begins to seem like reality. Candidate Obama had some big ideas, but president Obama seems to have fallen off some of those. Unfortunately, it is a sad reality of Washington, someone can go there with the best of intentions, and be pulled in by the ideals of money. Which is why nothing ever seems to change, they live on a different planet.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

4. A republic controlled by big corporations

politicians don't seem to have control that they though they would?

[JayhawkSD]

5. Sure, this is perfectly acceptable

We should never expect that politicians are going to be as legislators who they appeared to be during the campaign. Doing what one promised to do is so much harder then making the promise, that we should never actually expect them do do it. The campaign is just for show, and anyone who thinks that the campaign reflects any sort of reality is just foolish.

Football coaches always say that they are going to win the SuperBowl and, of course, only one of 32 ever does. We don't fire the other 31 of them do we? Of course not. We casually say that we didn't really expect them to win the SuperBowl and that we had fun watching them lose all those games, so they get to keep their jobs. Well, we fire them a great deal more often than we do legislators, so perhaps I need a better example.

I suppose that some of those campaigners really do think that they are going to be different, in which case they are the foolish one rather than the voters, but they are rare. Obama was not one of those. He was not one of those who really thought he was going to change Washington, and we had evidence of that when during the campaign he went to Washington to help pass the TARP bill and when, after vowing to filibuster against immunity for the telecom industry, he voted in favor of it. That was all well before the election, so we knew who he was and elected him anyway.

Mostly, the campaigners are just saying what the voters wnat to hear. Doesn't matter, though, because the voters aren't hearing it anyway. They are being anesthetized by television commercials, and whoever inundates them with the most commercials wins the elections. That would not work if voters were paying attention, of course, but they are not, so it does.

Welcome to democracy and governance, American style.

[Sunlei]

2. guess we will have to wait untill a non-armed 10k lb drone causes a major accident.

[Wilms]

3. ^

[MjolnirTime]

6. What are you going to do about it?

Nothing.

[rug]

7. Sen. Obama voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

[jazzimov]

8. Ahem,

Although he did speak out against the original Patriot Act on December 15 2005:
http://obamaspeeches.com/041-The-PATRIOT-Act-Obama-Speech.htm

on February 16 2006 he SUPPORTED the PATRIOT ACT re-authorization COMPROMISE:
http://obamaspeeches.com/053-Floor-Statement-S2271-PATRIOT-Act-Reauthorization-Obama-Speech.htm

So, I will be supporting the Patriot Act compromise. But I urge my colleagues to continue working on ways to improve the civil liberties protections in the Patriot Act after it is reauthorized.

Actually, the entire speech is a pretty good read - I encourage all to follow the link and read it in it's entirety.

And while we're at it, I'd like to address another misnomer consistently repeated here that "Obama reauthorized the PATRIOT ACT in 2011", which makes it sound as if he re-authorized the whole thing as it was originally written. As noted above, it was changed dramatically. Further, he only extended THREE parts of it:

On May 26, 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011,[2] a four-year extension of three key provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act: roving wiretaps, searches of business records (the "library records provision&quot , and conducting surveillance of "lone wolves"—individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups.

The first, roving wiretaps, was a bill designed to follow an individual rather than a specific phone number. This was to bring the procedures more up-to-date and in response to the use of "throw-away" cell phones.

Number 2, searching business records - who says that Obama is a corporate wh0re?

Number 3, "lone wolves" - this seems self-explanatory.

Can anyone seriously argue against these 3 provisions?

[treestar]

9. Maybe his definition of "abuses" is more in line with what the word is supposed to mean?

He went back to the FISA warrants, being perfectly consistent with his prior position. He does not think every leaker deserves whistleblower status, especially when they don't use the whistleblower protections. He thinks we need the metadata. You can disagree with him on that without claiming "abuses."